The Grebel Gallery, located in the heart of the Kindred Credit Union Centre for Peace Advancement, is pleased to showcase “New Fraktur,” an art exhibit by alumnus Meg Harder (BA 2013). Until October 25, visitors will be treated to works that draw on fraktur folk art, an imaginative and densely detailed illuminated calligraphy, historically produced by early Mennonite settlers. Fraktur was traditionally made to venerate important religious and cultural texts and was displayed in everyday contexts like the walls of homes and on the covers of Bibles and hymnals.
As an interdisciplinary artist, Meg works and lives in the Grand River Watershed. Her present research focuses on artistic practices that expand and disrupt canonized art forms and narrative genres to express emerging realities and revisionist histories. In recognition of her ancestral traditions, her ink and gouache drawings carry forward the aesthetic sensibilities of fraktur and biblical myth, while reframing their contents with a queer, feminine, and bioregional optic. She aims to disarm exploitative narratives and create space for new histories and futures.
Meg graduated with a BA in Fine Arts from the University of Waterloo, which included a six-month exchange at Bezalel Academy of Art in Jerusalem. She studied in Maine under Paula Wilson at Haystack Mountain School of Crafts in 2018. She was the 2015 Eastern Comma Artist in Residence at Rare Charitable Research Reserve in Cambridge, Ontario and resident at Vermont Studio Centre in 2018. She has exhibited at the Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery, Contemporary Art Forum of Kitchener and Area, and The Museum, Kitchener. She is a recent recipient of the Ontario Arts Council Emerging Artist Project Grant.
The Centre for Peace Advancement gratefully acknowledges the financial support of the Region of Waterloo Arts Fund.
https://uwaterloo.ca/centre-peace-advancement/grebel-gallery
