PROGRAM DETAILS:
Date Thursday, February 27, 2025
Time 5:30-7 PM
Location NUMU | 106 E. Main Street, Los Gatos, CA, 95030
Cost Free with standard admission & free for students
Join us for an artist talk with Made of Memory artist Cynthia Brannvall and art historian Dr. Elizabeth Carroll (SJSU and Foothill College). In this conversation, Brannvall reflects on the personal and historical significance of her artistic practice - both as an outlet for catharsis and as a tool for preserving materials, perspectives, and narratives that would otherwise be overlooked by dominant political and institutional forces. For Brannvall, her practice is an instrument for creating counter-narratives. In a time when artifacts and heirlooms are threatened by decay, destruction, and erasure, Brannvall speaks on the power that objects (and the memories they hold) can have, both personally and socially.
Cynthia Brannvall
Instagram | Website
Cynthia Brannvall is an art historian and a multi-media artist who teaches art history as a full-time faculty member of Foothill Community College. She is a California native of African American and Swedish descent. Cynthia has undergraduate degrees in Art Practice and Art History from UC Berkeley where she was a Phi Beta Kappa and a Ronald E. McNair scholar and was awarded the Departmental Citation for her research in Art History.
She has an MA in Art History from San Francisco State University with an emphasis on Modern and Contemporary art.
An advocate and ally for social justice and equity, Cynthia’s artwork explores identity formation envisioned in an imagined deep time terrain of memory, reclamation, and the geographies of forced and voluntary migrations of body and spirit.
Her artwork has selected for juried group exhibitions in the San Francisco Bay Area, San Luis Obispo, Los Angeles, New Orleans and Washington DC. Cynthia was selected for the 2022-2023 Emerging Artist’s Program at the Museum of African Diaspora in San Francisco where she had her first solo exhibition March 29-June 12, 2022. Cynthia has published short essays for exhibition catalogs, has juried The Wild Side exhibition at Arc gallery in San Francisco. Recent exhibitions include works in the On Land exhibition at Marin MOCA and a solo exhibition Constellating Narratives at Butte College. Cynthia is currently making new work during a 4 Year studio residency award at Cubberley Art Studios Program in Palo Alto California.
Dr. Elizabeth Carroll
Dr. Elizabeth Carroll is a Senior Lecturer and teaches in the Department of Art and Art History at San Jose State University (SJSU). Liz is a specialist in the art of early modern Venice and leads an SJSU Faculty Led Program in Venice, Italy. Her teaching interests include early modern Europe and History of Interior Design. She teaches Design in Society, the Art of 15th and 16th - century Italy, and the History of Interior Design. She has written articles on 16th-century Venetian art and co-edited multi-author volumes on the Early Modern Italian Domestic Interior and A Cultural History of Furniture. She has recently co-authored a chapter titled “Environmental equity for students in the library and LEED buildings,” in Practicing Social Justice in Libraries, ed. Alyssa Brissett and Diana Moronta, 2023. Her teaching interests in Design History emerged from her research on the Renaissance Italian Interior.