Image from "Awakening - Vicarello" by Canadian artist Marc Siegner in the Reconstructing Home exhibit at the NAU Art Museum Feb. 16 - April 7.

Home is where the art is

Sometimes you have to leave home to find it.

The "Places of the Heart" exhibit at the Coconino Center for the Arts and the "Reconstructing Home" exhibit at NAU's Art Museum are designed to inspire audiences to recognize place and home as more than a spot on a map.

"These exhibits should motivate people to explore how their thoughts, feelings and experiences influence the way they think about place," said Tamara Ramirez, a program coordinator for NAU's Program in Community, Culture and Environment, a sponsor for both events. "The creativity in these shows will help people to see and value a place in ways they may have not before."

"Places of the Heart" is scheduled for Feb. 9 - 24 at the Coconino Center for the Arts, 2300 N. Fort Valley Road. "Reconstructing Home" is scheduled for Feb. 16-April 7 at the NAU Art Museum in the Old Main building on north campus.

This year's "Places of the Heart," which has celebrated Flagstaff's most treasured sites through locally produced visual art and creative writing for five years, now includes photo and narrative selections from NAU's oral histories projects directed by Daniel Boone, a supervisor at Bilbly Research Center, and Peter Friederici, an assistant professor in the School of Communication.

The show also features visual and written works from the NAU Honors Program's Flagstaff -as-Text project.

In addition to the exhibit's collection of artwork that "maps" favorite Flagstaff places through visual and written pieces by local artists of all ages, "Places of the Heart" will include two video-installation works from the featured artists in NAU's "Reconstructing Home" exhibit.

"Reconstructing Home" at the NAU Art Museum is a two-person video installation collaborative featuring the artwork of Debra Edgerton, an instructor in the School of Art, and Marc Siegner, a Canadian artist.

"'Reconstructing Home' explores ways of addressing the evolving elements of place and belonging," Ramirez said. "It is an investigation into the concept of home through differences in culture, gender perspectives, movement and stability and family dynamics and displacement."

"Places of the Heart" is made possible through NAU's Program in Community, Culture and Environment, with support from NAU's Ecological Oral Histories Project and the NAU Honors Program.

"Reconstructing Home" is made possible by support from the Arizona Commission on the Arts, the Elizabeth Firestone Graham Foundation and the Alberta Foundation for the Arts and NAU's Program in Community, Culture and Environment.

For information, contact Tamara Ramirez at (928) 523-0499 or Tamara.Ramirez@nau.edu, or visit www2.nau.edu/community.

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