Today we’d like to introduce you to Brenda Bancel.
Brenda, we’d love to hear your story and how you got to where you are today both personally and as an artist.
I worked in advertising for ten years on clients such as Apple and IBM. Through this experience, I really appreciated and admired creative work. When I got married and we had a family, I started to rethink how I wanted to use my time. After living in Europe for several years, we ended up in Boston in 2008. I quickly enrolled in the two-year photography program at the New England School of Photography.
I believe that the camera is an incredibly powerful tool and this led to my first photographic journey. Out of school, I co-founded with my husband a foundation called TAKE 5. We take five kids each year from the underserved community, give them cameras and instruction and use it as a confidence boosting tool. Take 5 is also a mentorship program. It is now in its seventh year, and I still see the kids from my first group.
In 2014 after traveling to Varanasi India with a National Geographic photographer I had another shift in my photographic direction. I had never seen such poverty, so much death. I ended up photographing nine children who had been following me around while I worked. I fell in love with these children and my heart still breaks for their circumstances. I remain in touch with them and go back to see them. It was this trip that led me to enroll into the special student program at the Harvard Divinity School. I wanted some knowledge to back-up my emotional experiences.
My latest work reflects the learning from attending divinity school. It has a social justice angle and is titled, “How do we hold our differences tenderly.” It addresses topics such as political parties, disrupting assumptions of people and also religious discrimination. As I grow in my photography, I realize what really makes me happy is when I find the cross section of where creativity and compassion intersect.
We’d love to hear more about your art. What do you do you do and why and what do you hope others will take away from your work?
It’s funny, because I do a lot of underwater photography which is fun and light and people enjoy. I also do work titled, “In God’s Studio” where I photograph snow when the sky is entirely white. I love how the white in winter can make color pop in an image. These two bodies of work, are fun and keep me happy and occupied in New England where let’s face it, if you are not photographing winter, you’re not photographing for months.
But when I really get excited and start pushing my work is when there’s a story I feel compelled to share. My new show is titled, “How do we hold our differences tenderly.” This show was put together because of my fear that our society was becoming polarized. Democrats are throwing out huge ugly names at Republicans who are throwing out huge ugly names, cities such as Baltimore and Ferguson are expressing deeply rooted racial biases. These things worry me.
This work includes a grouping called, “Disrupting our assumptions.” These entail six portraits that are on the wall, and six different projectors are actually projecting words onto the portraits. For example, for the execution on, “Black lives matter,” the negative words are; nigger, drug dealer, lazy. These are the words that my model told me he is called. These words are then shattered and fall down the image and new words come up on the portrait. The new words are what these individuals identify themselves as such as, “Educator, lover, Innovator”. These words get larger and larger and then stay. We have to disrupt our assumptions of people, because stereotypes rob us of our dignity.
Within this work are also executions for “Republican and Democrat”. For this, I was involved in a four-month assignment where I reached out to someone politically opposite of myself. As a republican she said to me, “You are going to call me homophobic and a racist”. What was interesting, was thinking about how these are big, harsh, horrible words and when we talked further, her words were actually, “I’m traditional and I’m unsure about immigration.” We have to be careful about polarizing the discussion. Our identities are all constructed and with the right sentiments, we can all learn and weave different and new ideas into our identities. Social media doesn’t allow for us to have these more massaged conversations where one on one, we can connect and listen to each other’s value systems. We can respectively disagree, but we will also always find commonalities that can connect and unite us.
The overall piece for the show is a woman in hijab photographed seven different times in all the different colors of the rainbow. To me it says everything. Respect people’s religions, their sexual identities. We can’t just iron everyone out to be the same, we need to deal deeply with our differences.
What do you know now that you wished you had learned earlier?
Being an artist is hard. You have to play a game of what will sell with what do I want to say. The sweet spot is when you can find the overlap. All I can say is, when I work from my heart, the right people fall into my life. This is not only enriching, but hugely instrumental in how I get my work seen and expressed.
Do you have any events or exhibitions coming up? Where would one go to see more of your work? How can people support you and your artwork?
My “Holding differences tenderly” work can be seen right now at the Center for World Religious Studies at the Harvard Divinity school. It is also up at the Vilna Shul in Beacon Hill until the end of May. My India work will be in the store Ouimille on Charles Street in Beacon Hill. The opening is June 1st from 6-9:00. This work will be up for the summer.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.brendabancel.com, www.555gallery.com
- Email: brenda_bancel@mail.harvard.edu
- Instagram: bbancel
- Twitter: bbancel
Image Credit:
Copyright brenda bancel
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