‘Meditations for the Hand’ Opens
At Long Island University’s Brooklyn Campus

Art Exhibition Is Part of Citywide Buddhism Project

Brooklyn, N.Y. – Long Island University’s Brooklyn Campus will host an exhibition, "Meditations for the Hand," with drawings and paintings by several artists based on movement that represents a "kind of chanting of the hand."

The exhibition is part of the Buddhism Project – an unprecedented yearlong collaboration between 20 of the city’s major cultural institutions that explores the many relationships of Buddhism and the arts to contemporary American culture.

The Brooklyn Campus exhibit, curated by five myles gallery, will take place from August 11 to September 28 in the Campus’s Salena Gallery. An opening reception for the artists will be held on Wednesday, September 17, from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m.

Works in the show include two 18-foot long pencil drawings, intimating the ebb and flow of nature, by Sophie Jeehuan Kim; six ballpoint pen drawings of ordinary objects, which were made in one draft, by the artist Renato; and 300 feet of knitting, by the women of Hovik, Norway, which will be given to a monastery in the Himalayas.

Other artists and their works are Barbara Hatfield, whose horizontal panels filled with marks made of beeswax and graphite invoke calligraphy; Barbara Kreft, whose paintings of small lines, squares and dots serve as a road map to negotiating life’s contradictions; Lee Etheredge IV, whose manipulation of spacing and alternating upper- and lower-case type represents poetry and intense personal meditation; Phong Bui, whose interest in writer Saint-Exupéry produces an exterior and interior world built of a hybrid of written words and visuals; Glen Goldberg, whose multitude of colorful dots create mandala-like configurations; and Alice Attie, whose fascination with literature enables her to construct works in which reading is inseparable from writing and drawing.

Gallery hours are from Monday through Friday, 9 a.m. to 6 p.m., and Saturday/Sunday from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. For more information on the exhibit, call (718) 488-1198.

Long Island University opened its Brooklyn Campus in 1926, welcoming a diverse population at a time when other major universities enforced quota systems against racial and ethnic minorities. Some 30,000 students currently are enrolled at the university’s three residential and three regional campuses, including more than 11,000 at the Brooklyn Campus. Located at the corner of Flatbush Avenue Extension and DeKalb Avenue in Downtown Brooklyn, the Campus is accessible to all major bus and subway routes and the Long Island Rail Road.