with Our Gallery Director, Matthew Clay-Robison, will be in Yogyakarta, Indonesia for the next five months as a Fulbright U.S. Scholar. If you would like to follow his research there, please follow @mcr_curator. Matthew Clay-Robison is an artist and curator whose practice-based research project, “Multiplicity: Visual Art as an Agent of Intercultural Understanding,” seeks to create a visual discourse between contemporary artists in the United States and Indonesia through print trade portfolios and exhibitions. His research period is from June to November 2023.

Based in Yogyakarta, Matthew is working on his project with guidance from Nano Warsono, Director of the R.J. Katamsi Gallery @galeri_rjkatamsi at the Indonesia Institute of the Arts (ISI-Yogyakarta.)@isiyogyakarta_official This project will examine visual art’s capacity for communicating shared experiences, emotions and recognized truths that reach beyond the limitation of words, particularly in the absence of a common spoken language. This research is particularly interested in the medium of printmaking and how the process of printing multiples enables artists to engage in a visual dialogue that each participant owns and can share with others. This research also considers the educational impact of exhibitions and what it means to curate a survey exhibition of contemporary art in a country as varied and diverse as Indonesia.
Selected as a U.S. Fulbright Scholar in 2020, Matthew’s research was delayed by the global pandemic, however in the last three years he has organized exhibitions by Indonesian artist Entang Wiharso and the Indonesian collective Taring Padi at his home institution, York College of Pennsylvania and co-curated an exhibition by Mohamad ‘Ucup’ Yusuf at Carroll Community College in Westminster, MD. Additional research was conducted last summer at Documenta 15 in Kassel, Germany where he spent time with artists from the Indonesian collectives ruangrupa, Taring Padi, and Jatiwangi Art Factory.