“Speakin’ Truth in Love”, Aaron Cowan

MFA Thesis Exhibition

Donna Beam Gallery

February 16 – 25, 2022

Gallery Hours: Monday – Friday, 9 a.m.-4 p.m.

The Donna Beam Gallery presents the MFA Thesis Exhibition for Aaron Cowan. Cowan mines his own history and experiences of growing up in Southeastern United States, wrestling with objects and materials from cultural identities of masculine power, their environments, and accoutrements. He hunts and scavenges thrift stores and yard sales, transforming what he finds from cultural identities of white, masculine power into expressions of poetry, beauty, and love that work against their original intents of indoctrination. Sports, hunting, and the male body are common ground for engagement and sharing ideas around undoing harmful aspects of masculinity by deconstructing and repurposing them into expressions of authentic emotion, vulnerability, and empathy rather than honor, strength, and mastery.