Let’s Have a Conversation at the Dining Table, a groundbreaking exhibition curated by UConn MFA candidate Dakota Halliburton, facilitates a contemporary art dialogue between Deaf and hearing artists. This exhibition of artists from the United States, Australia, India, and Canada, invites viewers into a shared space with nine artists who connect through life experiences and creative conversations.

Through symbolism, color, and visual narrative, Nancy Rourke’s paintings explore social, political, and cultural realities that have shaped Deaf lives across history and continue to influence our communities. Her work centers on the themes of resistance, affirmation, and liberation within the Deaf experience. Janhavi Khemka’s installation Letter to My Mother, a projection on a low platform adorned with an animated pattern of lips is described by the artist as “reminiscent of the mat on which we once sat together to learn the art of lip-reading.” The beautiful and award-winning video The Beauty of Being Deaf, by Chellaman, features a Deaf cast performing a poem in American sign language underwater. Sonja Czekalski’s Pick Your Poison transforms the ritual of drinking tea into a meditation on choice, memory and women’s knowledge. In her series You Get That from Me and The Sleep in My Eye, Chelsea Taylor explores the interwoven relationship between the tangible and the unseen. She focuses on her personal experiences while simultaneously examining the topics within them that relate to broader problems affecting broader populations. Sophie Pearson, who presents paintings in oils, writes “Art is no longer a tool for distraction, but a tool for exposure, leading me to confront my darker memories and share them with those who they reach.” Laurie Landry’s oil paintings explore how meaning is constructed through gesture, posture, movement, and spatial relationship rather than spoken language alone. Charlotte Rose Eschelman presents photographs that explore the impossibility of knowing a person fully and the nonlinearity of personal histories. The artist writes, “The photographs contemplate what we do with what we are given, how trauma is inherited and passed to the next generation through the body, and the complex intimacy of the mother-child relationship.” In Sue Jo Wright’s Endless Conversation, fabric becomes a vessel for the enduring exchange of joy and pain, weaving together a narrative of conversation through stitching. Her piece, Disposable Feelings, defines her feelings of isolation, diminishment, and insignificance, represented by the triviality of a symbolic handkerchief.