Barcelona Faculty Members Offer Exhibit at Widener

	(l-r) Jo Milne and Tanit Plana.

From September 6 to October 6, the Widener Gallery in the Austin Arts Center hosted “Between Two Worlds,” an exhibition featuring works by two studio arts faculty members from the Trinity-in-Barcelona Global Learning Site. Jo Milne teaches drawing, painting, and printmaking at the Barcelona site, while Tanit Plana teaches photography. Milne and Plana visited Trinity’s Hartford campus in early October to meet with students and other faculty members. For them, the highlight of the visit was the opportunity to talk directly with students from classes that visited the exhibition.

“Normally, you have an exhibition and you have an opening and then you don’t have any more contact with the public,” explains Milne. “But here, it has been the other way round. It shows the benefit of having a gallery space within the school. It brings artists into the space and allows students who are not necessarily art majors to have a dialogue with us. That breaks down boundaries. We feel that we have received a lot from the sharing of ideas as well.”

“We started by asking the students questions so they could say how they perceive the work, how it has been put together, also about the content,” notes Plana. “It is helpful for us to see what the audience gets. That is my ideal relation to my audience.”

Both artists also welcome the opportunity to teach Trinity students who attend the Barcelona program. “It is a privilege, because you have access to the way young people think who are from another country,” says Milne. “To be able to shape somebody’s way of questioning the world around them and the cultures they experience is a very important task. You have a dialogue that maybe allows them to see their own culture and the new culture they are experiencing with new eyes.”

“They come there with illusions, and they come there to grab everything and to learn,” adds Plana. “They have to interact and be active in the new environment. I ask them to think about what they are in front of and to make a dialogue between the ideas they came with and what they have found in Barcelona.”

Story contributed by Drew Sanborn

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