Following little Meiya as she runs around her father’s store, carrying pens and paper, Meiya Rollins PO ’29 reflects on her and her father’s shared love of comics in the exhibition “Interference Patterns” at the Benton Museum of Art at Pomona College. Consisting of John Sparagana’s work, who splices and remixes popular images, she instantly gravitated towards his piece “Superman Variations.” Rollins questions her interest in this piece as she says, “What context is Sparagana wanting to take away from this popular comic, and what is he wanting us to see?”
Author: Meiya Rollins
The Daily Palette: The lasting effects of ‘Atomic Dragons’
Exploring the Cold War and its effects now, Meiya Rollins PO ’29 reflects on the exhibition “Atomic Dragons” at the Pitzer Art Galleries. From her previous readings in her curation class, she was instantly tethered to Judtih Dancoff’s work. Judith Dancoff narrates her own experiences of her father working on the Manhattan Project with Oppenheimer. Rollins describes the letters between Dancoff’s father and Oppenheimer in the piece, “The Dancoff Factor,” where they are a “window into their relationship with each other and their work. It was work that slowly killed them, but quickly destroyed the lives of so many.”
The Daily Palette: Exploring identity in ‘Means to an End’
Exploring her conflicting identity of being the quiet girl with her passion for art, Meiya Rollins PO ’29 reflects on the exhibition “Means to an End” at the Ruth Chandler Williamson Gallery at Scripps College. She becomes captivated by an artist, Debra Broz, who reconfigures porcelain animals into uncanny hybrids that allows her to explore identity. Rollins connects moments of her elementary school speech classes to her experiences in college, where she has finally come to the realization that, like porcelain, patience is needed to grow.
The Daily Palette: Tangles of Resistance in She Opens the Door
Starting with a poem that channels her feelings of the current state of the world, Meiya Rollins PO ’29 reflects on the exhibition She Opens the Door: Women Artists and Writers Shape Language and Space at the Claremont Lewis Museum of Art. She admires how Culverson, an LA-based artist, creates a cascading waterfall of fabrics that resists the binaries of society in her piece Float.
The Feline Stare: Understanding Complications in Color
Meiya Rollins PO ’29 reflects on the exhibition, “Complications in Color,” at the Claremont Lewis Museum of Art. Sadness strikes as Rollins admires the work of Rachel Lachowicz, a Californian abstract artist who uses makeup to address femininity, as she reflects back on her art portfolio that followed a similar theme, to a specific art piece as a kid.
The Feline Stare: Analyzing Carmen Argote: gajes del oficio
A fabric snag that felt like the end of the world, Meiya Rollins PO ’’ ’29 reflects on Carmen Argote’s exhibition: gajes del oficio at Pitzer College. She analyzes Argote’s personal and historical references constructed into jumpsuits that run across two different galleries, creating a narrative of the trade of sewing that runs within families.
The Feline Stare: Finding myself in Hiroshige’s Ricefields
Am I a cat? Meiya Rollins PO ’29 reflects on the “Art After Hours” event at the Benton Museum of Art. She marvels at how artist Utagawa Hiroshige places the viewer not in the festival, but at a distance, in a home made of crisp diagonals that lead the eyes to the festival and the sunset that surrounds Mount Fuji.