The Office of Pluralism and Leadership (OPAL) is facilitating a student-led visual art project called B.R.U.S.H.E.D.:

Beauty Reclaimed, Upended, Shaken, Humanized, Expanded, and Darkened.



BRUSHED is a project for those brushed aside.

This project is an effort to challenge elitist, Eurocentric standards of beauty (on Dartmouth's campus and beyond) through artistic displays of, and for, students of color.

This project aims to question the narrow notion of what a 'muse' looks like.



We are calling for students of color who will be on campus during Winter 2017 and/or Spring 2017 to model for portraits (each student would have 2 portraits - 1 photographed, and 1 drawn/painted).

These portraits would be displayed in Spring 2017.

The display will have an outdoor location, central to campus (official location is to be announced) and the portraits will be accompanied by statements from both the artists and the student models.

The portraits will be sheathed for protection against the elements. We plan to mount them (alongside the statements) on ornamented lawn stakes.



We ask that interested students complete this application<https://goo.gl/forms/RTfgG4GLSExECWtv1> by Friday, November 18th at 11:59 pm. There will be a cap on the number of models.

Models will be partnered with artists by the beginning of December, at which time they will receive further information about the completion of the portrait(s).

Both models and artists will receive copies of the portraits (the artist will keep the original, and the model will receive a print or photograph, depending on the medium used).

The application asks for:

*        a little info about you

*        an approx. 100-word explanation of your interest in the project



You might ask why beauty is the focus of this project:

The project's student initiator, Liza Wemakor '18, believes "Beauty is very political. It is tightly bound to how much humanity we perceive in one another, and how well we treat one another. I believe the celebration of beauty could be a wonderful conduit for love, but it becomes harmful when it is limited to select people, and policed by hierarchical standards. I want to reclaim beauty as something that is not limited. I hope this project will make space for that reclamation." Much of her inspiration for this project came from 'modeling' for artist Samantha Modder '17 in Summer 2016. Viewing herself as an artistic muse for the first time was a very powerful experience that she hopes to share with more people.



-Please email Liza at [log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]> with any questions -