Center for Sexuality and Gender Diversity (University Park)

PROJECT INSTALLATION

PROJECT PROPOSAL

Tamara Gayer is known for her colorful, large-scale installations and public projects. She frequently uses pattern, text, and bright color to communicate the histories of the sites she works in. Gayer’s collaboration with the newly named Center for Sexual and Gender Diversity (formerly LGBTQA Student Resource Center) will explore color and language as seen from the perspective of queer experience.

ARTIST’S PROCESS STATEMENT: Something Means Something Else is being created as part of the new home of the Center for Sexual and Gender Diversity. The three-part mural employs the many faces of abstraction (pattern, color, symbol, light) to present the intricacies of the current moment in sexual and gender identity. Taking the contemporary abundance of gender symbols and the overlapping color schemes of numerous pride flags alongside a line from June Jordan’s “Poem for South African Women” as its starting point Something Means Something Else weaves itself into and around the Center and its surroundings. The artwork uses a series of windows, which curve into the space like a snail, as an armature. The work uses color, light reflections and patterns to turn the “viewer” into a “feeler,” of their own body and the space surrounds them. Because windows naturally lend themselves to positions of inside/outside/becoming/ being on the fence/going through, the physicality of the piece works hand in hand with a form of pattern making that relies on the shapes of gender symbols to create a lattice that supports alternate identities, desires and communities.

The Center for Sexual and Gender Diversity is now open in it’s new home in the former Robeson Gallery space within the HUB-Robeson Center on the University Park campus. The murals are now on display through 2020.

PARTNER COMMITTEE
Brian Patchcoski, Director
Sonya Wilmoth, Assistant Director
Stephanie Whitesell, Office Coordinator
Alex Rupp, a second year student in the College of Arts and Architecture, Marketing and Communications Student Staff Member in the Center for Sexual and Gender Diversity
Sarah MacDonald, Academic Advisor, College of the Liberal Arts
Symone McCollum, PSU Student, Graduate Assistant

SUPPORTERS AND PARTICIPANTS
Peggy Lorah, Interim Assistant VP of Student Affairs, Diversity & Inclusion
Mary Edgington, Senior Director, HUB-Robeson Center, Student Affairs Facilities and Staff Development
Shea Bracken, Director, Communications & Marketing, Student Affairs
Marissa Duffy, Administrative Support Assistant, DEI in Student Affairs
Kathy Poissant, Architect, Design Services
Kristen Capparelli, Designer, Knoll
Celeste Good, PSU student, President, QTPOC
Lauren Whitley, PSU student, Peer Education Student Staff Member in CSGD
Ryley Lehew, PSU student, Former CSGD Student Staff Member
Freddy Pumell, PSU student, President LGBTQA Student Roundtable