WINTER PARK, FL.- From September 17, 2014 to January 4, 2015, the Cornell Fine Arts Museum at Rollins College in Winter Park, FL presents the exhibition Fractured Narratives: a strategy to engage, the first exhibition inspired by the Alfond Collection of Contemporary Art at Rollins College. The exhibition features work by established and emerging artists who address contemporary global issues such as privacy, modern warfare, the environment, and freedom of expression. Fractured Narratives aims to provoke critical dialogue and reflection by engaging visitors with the challenging ambiguities of complex narratives. The selected works offer diverse and nuanced considerations of the changing political, cultural, psychological, and social context of the past 10 years.

Co-curated by Cornell Fine Arts Museum Curator Amy Galpin and independent curator Abigail Ross Goodman, the exhibition features film, photography, painting, sculpture, and sound by 14 artists from around the world: Dawoud Bey (b. Queens, New York), Omer Fast (b. Jerusalem, Israel), Eric Gottesman (b. Nashua, New Hampshire), Jenny Holzer (b. Gallipolis, Ohio), Alfredo Jaar (b. Santiago, Chile), Amar Kanwar (b. New Delhi, India), William Kentridge (b. Johannesburg, South Africa), An-My Lê (b. Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam), Maya Lin (b. Athens, Ohio), Goshka Macuga (b. Warsaw, Poland), “Moris” Israel Moreno (b. Mexico City, Mexico), Rivane Neuenschwander (b. Belo Horizonte, Brazil), Trevor Paglen (b. Camp Spring, Maryland), and Martha Rosler (b. Brooklyn, New York).

Exhibition highlights include Muxima (2005), a video work by Alfredo Jaar, featuring fragmented vignettes of landmines, the AIDS crisis, and remnants of colonialism in Angola; Jenny Holzer’s large-scale color-blocked painting water-board 14 (2010), which depicts a redacted, confidential U.S. government document; Trevor Paglen’s photograph Untitled (Reaper Drone, 2012), which captures a nearly invisible drone mid-flight in a seemingly serene skyscape; Goshka Macuga’s Anti-Collage (Julita Wojcik, 2011), which evokes questions of power and control by subverting the techniques of censorship; An-My Lê’s photographic depictions of war and military culture that play with fact and fiction; and photographs and a film by Eric Gottesman that are inspired by his exploration of the dissident Ethiopian novel Oromaye.

Fractured Narratives features works drawn from the Alfond Collection as well as major loans. Also on view at the nearby Alfond Inn, a visionary philanthropic boutique hotel owned by Rollins College, are an additional twelve works from the Alfond Collection that relate to and extend the exhibition by artists such as Richard Mosse, Cobi Moules, Sandra Ramos, Trevor Paglen and others.

“Over the next few months, Fractured Narratives will create opportunities for visitors to reflect on and engage in conversation about the intricacies of our changing global landscape,” states Ena Heller, the Bruce A. Beal Director of the Cornell Fine Arts Museum at Rollins College. “The Alfond Collection of Contemporary Art was established to inspire exactly this type of dialogue and contemplation, and I hope that every visitor will become an active participant.”

Barbara and Ted Alfond (Rollins class of 1968) established the Alfond Collection of Contemporary Art at Rollins College in 2013. The collection was conceived as a “visual syllabus” for the liberal arts education offered at Rollins College. The collection offers opportunities for study, investigation and developing new kinds of visual and cultural wisdom, the result of which is crucial to the development of a new generation of global citizens who, in valuing difference, will care enough to learn one another’s languages, both literally and figuratively. To date the evolving collection includes more than 220 paintings, photographs, sculptures, and mixed-media works by established and emerging artists from around the world. The collection is housed at the College’s Cornell Fine Arts Museum and is on rotating display at The Alfond Inn. Since opening in August 2013, net proceeds from The Alfond Inn have been directed to the Alfond Scholars program fund, which has awarded three full scholarships to date.

“Through Fractured Narratives, we seek to expand upon the narratives depicted or evoked by the works in the Alfond Collection of Contemporary Art, and to further examine how objects can express societal struggles and ills in less direct—though perhaps more complex—ways,” remarked co-curator Amy Galpin.

“We hope that the exhibition offers opportunities for visitors to engage in the noble effort to turn visual literacy into a kind of global sensitivity,” writes co-curator Abigail Goodman. “Learning to look keenly and critically is a necessary component of any search for wisdom and understanding of the world—not just as it is presented, but as it truly is.”