Tanja Softic
Art professor draws on life experience to create an ambitious series of work
February 3, 2010
On the day Associate Professor of Art Tanja Softic defended her master of fine arts thesis at Old Dominion University in 1992, war broke out in her hometown of Sarajevo. “My plan was to go back [to Sarajevo] after I graduated in 1992,” she recalls. With her country embroiled in the Bosnian Civil War, however, her plans suddenly changed.
By the time Softic arrived to teach at the University of Richmond in 2000, she had become a U.S. citizen. As she explains in her artist’s statement, “I have transitioned through three citizenships in addition to one period of being a citizen of no country.”
This experience has deeply influenced her work.
For the past three years, Softic has explored the themes of cultural identity and hybridity in “Migrant Universe,” an ambitious series of 18 large-scale mixed-media works on paper. Each piece in the series measures 60-by-60 inches, and when exhibited, some are joined together to form even larger works. She plans to finish the series by June and hopes to mount a traveling exhibition that will include a printed catalog.
Last fall, Softic took a leave of absence from the University for Richmond to work on the project at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, an international retreat for artists, writers and composers in Amherst, Va. She was supported by a $22,000 grant from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, which assists artists who have worked professionally over a significant period. “The grant goddess smiled at me in terms of this ‘Migrant Universe’ project,” she says.
It was her third residency at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts to work on “Migrant Universe.” Her two other stints were supported through fellowships from the Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation and Reynolds Foundation. In 2009, the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts also awarded Softic a professional artist fellowship in drawing.
Being able to work in a large studio at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts has been crucial to her work. “I can work on several of those large pieces and step back and really see them,” she says. “That’s not something I always can do in my [smaller] studio here.”
Softic’s work combines symbolic images of birds, electrical towers and vessels in complex, layered compositions. “You don’t look at my work and necessarily say, ‘She is talking about hybridity,’” she admits. “…I am not punching anybody between the eyes with it. What I think I am doing in my work is asking for — demanding — conversation with a viewer.”
As someone who lived the first 23 years of her life as a citizen of a different country, Softic invites her audience to ponder notions of belonging, and what it means to be a foreigner in a foreign land.
“I feel very American when I am back in Sarajevo, and feel Sarajevan when I come back,” she says. “Not being really sure about your identity is not really tragic — like something was lost. It is a reality that I share with many, many people in the world.”
That includes many on Richmond’s campus, which has become increasingly international during Softic’s decade teaching here. This year she became chair of the art and art history department.
“I love the fact that our student body and faculty and staff bodies have become so international,” she says. “I love to see greater diversity in my classroom. I think it serves everybody better. We have so much to learn from each other. Everything good that has happened in my life ... has come from my world being shaken a little bit from the influence of people I would not have met had I stayed in Sarajevo.”
