This exhibition came to fruition in the spring of 2021, a year after the coronavirus began spreading across the world. After a year of tremendous loss and uncertainty, we bear the daily weights of grief and isolation and begin to imagine immunity as an end to this pandemic. In the past year, we’ve developed a new language—both verbal and visual—where case counts alarm us, masks are pervasive, and video calls never cease. Many of the photographs exhibited bear the marks of these new facets of life. Others celebrate the rituals of our pre-pandemic lives and lament how they’ve changed.

Just as every identity is unique, no two pandemic experiences have been the same. The photographs in the exhibition are diverse in subject matter and mediums, in the people and places they depict. The photographers span five years of Vassar life—from the Class of 2024 to the Class of 2020—and made these pictures around the world—on campus, across the U.S., in Mexico, Norway, Spain, Turkey, and China. Much like Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera, the inspiration behind the exhibition’s title, these photographs depict individual worlds where love and connection are intensified by emotional and viral illness. Together, they make the effects of an invisible virus tangible and personal.

This exhibition was sponsored, in part, by the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center and is a deeply collaborative effort between the FLLAC and PHOCUS. PHOCUS is Vassar’s student photography organization. PHOCUS fosters an accessible community of student photographers of all interests and skill levels through programming including weekly meetings, critiques, workshops, exhibitions, guest lectures, and an annual photobook. Since 1999, PHOCUS has run the Baldeck Photographic Center, a community darkroom open to all students.

In particular, we are grateful to Massimo Tarridas ’22, Laila Bárcenas Meade ’22, Grace Rousell ’23 for their contributions to the jurying and curatorial processes, and to Andrea Baldeck ’72 and Amy Kaslow ’81 for hosting artist’s talks in tandem with the exhibition. We also wish to thank President Elizabeth H. Bradley, T. Barton Thurber, Jessica Brier, Mary-Kay Lombino, Francine Brown, Eleanor White, Joshua Horneff ’19, Teresa Quinn, Angela DePaolo, and Aidan Gallagher for helping to make this show a reality.

• Cassie Jain ’20, Post-Baccalaureate Curatorial Fellow, FLLAC
• Monica Church, Advisor to Phocus and the Baldeck Photographic Center Co-Curators

Photograph by Monica Church
To view the physical exhibit, please visit:
Jade Parlor, on the second of Main Building, Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, New York. On view 2021-2022.

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About the Jade Parlor

This installation of student art, and specifically a theme surrounding identity, is a response to the Jade Parlor’s ambiguous history as a space dedicated to Vassar’s first international students. Despite this dedication, no one is exactly sure of its origin; further, it is unclear how or if this title relates to the room’s Asian-influenced decor. Much of the information known about this room is the result of Ford Scholars research conducted by Adhira Mangalagiri ’11 and Professor Martha Kaplan, Professor and Chair of Anthropology.

Since the opening of Main Building in 1865, the room has undergone a series of renovations. It first served as a parlor for senior students, then a lecture hall, and ultimately became the multipurpose gathering space it remains today. Since at least the 1880s, the decor has included elements of Asian style, including painted screens, gilded murals, and patterned upholstery. While some of the furnishings were actually from China or Japan, others simply co-opted motifs of Asian art—lotus, lilies, cranes, and hummingbirds—and stylistic approaches, including painting and color schemes, without known context. This collection and imitation of Asian art was pervasive in popular North American interior design and architecture of the time, including the Victorian, Neoclassical, and Beaux Arts styles that influenced campus design. While this contextualizes the Jade Parlor within larger aesthetic trends, it also reveals the complex relationship between international relations, art, and Orientalism in the nineteenth and twentieth-century North American culture.

If Jade Parlor was truly dedicated to the first international Vassar students—Stematz Yamakawa and Shige Nagai, who came to Vassar in 1871 as part of a Japanese government initiative to experience American higher education—then the space can be understood as a representation of political, economic, and cultural exchanges at Vassar, in the port city of Poughkeepsie, and between the U.S. and Asia. In its role as a communal space, Jade Parlor continues to foster connection between the diverse identities within and outside of the Vassar community, as perhaps was originally intended. However, it is important to remember that these original exchanges nonetheless took place alongside Orientalist beliefs and the co-opting of art and aesthetics that continue to affect Asian and Asian-American identities today.