Shanta Lee Gander

What does it mean when an item within a museum talks back? How are the concepts of the trained gaze, the panopticon, and the sacred feminine connected? Artist and writer Shanta Lee Gander probes these questions and more in Dark Goddess: An Exploration of the Sacred Feminine. This book accompanies the exhibition of Gander's photo series of the same name, on view at the Fleming Museum of Art at the University of Vermont from February 8 to December 9, 2022. This innovative exhibition catalogue features essays by University of Vermont professors Dr. Vicki L. Brennan (Department of Religion) and Dr. Emily Bernard (Department of English), alongside interviews with Gander's models for the Dark Goddess series, and original written work inspired by items in the Fleming Museum of Art's collection. Conceived in tandem, the publication and exhibition weave together themes of the human gaze, an artist's self-inquiry, history, ethnography, and an exploration of the duality of sacred and profane.

Black Metamorphoses, invites a reckoning of the past inviting readers to sift through known and unknown parts of history through verse, collective historical memory, and mythos of the forcibly traveled Black body. Black Metamorphoses pierces a 2000+ year-old veil inspired by a range of Ovidian myths while resisting a direct conversion of the work. This collection explores the Black psyche, body, soul, through inversion and brazen confrontation of work that has shaped Western civilization. In a poetic range of forms, voices, and rhythms, the reader is bathed in ancestral memory, myth, and sense of the timeless of the shapeshifting, resilient Black body. This complete volume of work enters into another level of conversation with original interior illustrations created by visual artist Alan Blackwell. These illustrations create an additional kind of text and layer of mythos for the reader.