October 10, 2023
Meghan O'Toole
Susy Bielak opens major multimedia exhibition
Fred Schmalz and Susy Bielak at the opening of their exhibition.
Assistant Professor of Art Susy Bielak has opened a new exhibit with collaborator Fred Schmalz, commissioned by Grand Central Art Center (GCAC), California State University, Fullerton.
The exhibition, Welcome, is the culmination of a multi-year invited residency supported by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. Welcome opened on October 7, 2023 and is based on four years of research in Orange County, California.
“We are artists invested in the places around us,” Bielak explained. “With this project, we are interested in drawing attention to the ways in which exclusion and belonging are written into our environments. The exhibition Welcome revolves around the limits of that word. We want to challenge audiences to consider the ways exclusion, including in the form of white nationalism, operates alongside solidarity and resistance. The exhibit aims to surface these histories and foster conversation and connection.”
The exhibition description states, “Welcome responds to contemporary and historical acts of social and environmental control in Orange County—including in plant hybridization, civic regulation, labor, immigration, and property division. Using video, drawing, sculpture, graphics, text, and sound, the works highlight how unwelcome coexists with joy and inclusion in Southern California.”
“I am excited by the scale of this installation,” Bielak said. Welcome features an AstroTurf hillside, video works, paintings, a sound installation, and a large infographic poem.
Bielak and Schmalz are artists who draw upon facets of daily life to speak to larger human concerns. For Welcome, the artists engaged with the greater Santa Ana and Orange County, California communities as they completed research that culminated in the exhibition.
“Bielak and Schmalz's approach to civic discourse, building authentic and trusted relationships over time, allows them to explore more significant possibilities to bring those relationships, including tuba player Abraham Hernandez and students and Music Director Ammy Beltran of Valley High School in Santa Ana, directly into the project,” GCAC Chief Curator and Director John D. Spiak said of the exhibition. “They have realized an incredible installation in our main gallery at Grand Central Art Center: something meaningful, relevant, and community-engaged while at the same time holding tight to a vision of aesthetics, which stands with any current exhibitions in the contemporary art landscape of today.”
Welcome is on display at Grand Central Art Center through January 14, 2024.
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