UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — The College of Arts and Architecture’s Woskob Family Gallery, located at 146 S. Allen Street in downtown State College, is hosting a closing reception for Michelle Hinojosa’s exhibition “Summer Pop-up” on Sept. 5 from 5 to 8 p.m. The reception will include a Q&A with Hinojosa, an assistant professor of art in the Penn State School of Visual Arts, beginning at 6 p.m. moderated by fellow Assistant Professor of Art Kumasi J. Barnett.
Consisting of oil paintings, quilt block tapestries and stop-motion animation, the exhibition broadly addresses color, narrative, and movement. The installation emphasizes relationships between colors and their movement through space. This approach reflects what Hinojosa calls a “border sensibility,” drawn from her lived experience in Texas and other parts of the United States.
To best fit the street level windows of the Woskob Family Gallery, Hinojosa assembled quilt blocks into six long tapestries. From the outside, window reflections of Allen Street's day-to-day bustle impart an ever-changing shimmering filter over the blocks, Hinojosa said. Inside the gallery, the sense of movement continues through an experimental 'dancing blocks' animation projected on the large wall.
“This was an exciting space to consider and works well to contrast the two paintings hanging over the alcove,” Hinojosa said. “Overall, it was an improvisational and playful process to bring my work to the unique space of the Woskob Family Gallery."
Michelle Hinojosa is a Latina artist and educator from Texas. Her practice encompasses poetry, public art projects, painting, quilting, and tapestry bead weaving to share the complex, multigenerational, Latinx experience of migration, which she describes as riddled with grief, delight and displacement.
Hinojosa earned a master of fine arts in art at the University of Michigan in 2023 preceded by a bachelor of fine arts in art education and drawing and painting at the University of North Texas in 2018.
Classes, student organizations and University offices are encouraged to visit the Woskob Family Gallery, a unit of the College of Arts and Architecture. Inquiries can be directed to woskob@psu.edu. For more information on this and other exhibitions, visit the Gallery’s website. Keep up to date with the Woskob Family Gallery by signing up for its Listserv or following on Instagram @woskobfamilygallery.