The first piece that Mira Goodman ’24 made for her honors thesis exhibition didn’t end up making the final cut.
“I made a painting of this guy, and it was front-facing,” Goodman said. But the painting, while a good reproduction of a photograph, didn’t capture the experiences the two shared, she explained.
To fully explore her personal relationships and recent experiences, Goodman decided to create an entire exhibition. “We will see us again,” which encompassed half of the second floor of the List Art Building last week, includes paintings, creative writing and sculptures.
“I feel like a lot of artists want to say something about the world, but it’s really hard and can feel overwhelming,” Goodman said. “I come back to myself and the people I’ve met, and hope that other people can also feel some sort of experience, memory or connection.”
Goodman placed the largest piece of the exhibit, a landscape painting titled “People Make Glasgow,” on the back wall to be the first piece encountered by viewers. The piece took 200 hours to complete, she said.
“It’s a reflection of my experience traveling in a city alone while studying abroad in Scotland,” she said. “I was documenting everything around me, like an old cell phone or condom wrapper on the ground, or the way the sky looked on a certain day.”
While Goodman has been painting since she was 15, she had to move away from the medium to accomplish her vision for “We will see us again.”
“People Make Glasgow” was accompanied by a creative writing piece titled “Walk it off.” The writing refers to Glasgow as “what may be the gloomiest city you’ve ever seen” and recounts her experience of going to a bar with a local.
“It’s not necessarily an explanation,” Goodman said. “I think incorporating what can be visual with what is written is really interesting.”
Goodman also created sculptures for the show that relate to everyday objects, experiences and people. Many of the pieces in the exhibit prominently featured the color blue.
“Blue in general is a big part of my color palette,” she said. “The color represents so much. It’s so interesting to have a pop of blue within a gray field.”
“Mira’s work is so genuine,” Hannah Bashkow ’23, a Visual Arts concentrator and one of Goodman’s collaborators, wrote in an email to The Herald. “I enjoy the balance of play and humor with gravity and sadness, and I feel she has a gift for blending the two in ways that feel natural.”
Goodman attributed the personal themes of her project to her efforts trying to combine her art and social justice with a future career path.
“It was a hard year to feel creative and feel inspired and feel optimistic,” Goodman said. “I think it is really important to emphasize the beauty of people and how much we mean to each other in this time. I hope that I can keep making work like that and keep making my life dedicated to this somehow.”
