The President’s Office at Teachers College is now showcasing a rotating collection of art from the Art & Art Education Program’s collection, which consists of work created by TC students and alumni.
Featured on this year’s holiday card is a work entitled Piazza: Finding Center, created by TC Alumna and artist Susan Ruth Cohen, M.Ed., Supervisor of Student Teachers at Teachers College.
Notes from the Artist
Susan Ruth Cohen
Piazza: Finding Center
Piazza: Finding Center, is one in a series of works that I call urban visualizations, in which I draw upon the rich text of Piazza: Finding Center urban spaces, and explore how the remembered, imagined, and visibly present exist concurrently within one stream of consciousness. I consider the tension between micro and macro worlds; an intimate/internal/individual world and a larger socio-political system come together within the concept of the piazza: a public meeting place where one can feel anonymous and alone (internal), and simultaneously be connected to others, as a participant in the social habitat (external). Here, in the piazza is a sense of place that spans across the specifics of events and locations: an overlapping compression of time and space within the two-dimensional plane, as throngs move in and out, gravitating toward the center. This drawing towards the center—both physically and conceptually—mirrors the need to come together, to form connections, to find one’s center, and feel at home. My artistic process—which includes tearing up pieces of my older artworks and then reassembling and layering the torn fragments into new visual stories—reflects my conceptual visualization of the piazza: a place of personal history and continuous transition, where never-ending crowds enter and leave, replacing themselves.