IC News

In a crowded gallery on The Commons, the pedestrian mall in downtown Ithaca, a smiling Safara Vache ’25 mingles with friends, family, and art enthusiasts at the opening her new solo show, Girl Embellish. Vache, an Art B.F.A. major from Rochester, NY, spent the summer in Ithaca creating the exhibition now on display … and she got paid to do it.

The Summer Scholars program at IC’s School of Humanities and Sciences affords students the opportunity to pursue research, scholarship, or creative inquiry projects—with the guidance and support of faculty mentors representing expertise in their respective fields—while getting paid for the eight-week summer engagements. Students propose projects through an application process each spring, culminating in approximately 30 summer projects (IC awarded 35 Summer Scholars in 2024). Among them, the Department of Art, Art History, and Architecture awards one student each summer the opportunity to create and install an exhibition in the Community Arts Partnership (CAP) space downtown.

Although art students receive opportunities to showcase their work in the Handwerker Gallery on campus, the prospect of engaging with the greater Ithaca community appealed to Vache. 

"I heard about the opportunity my junior year," she says. "I was already entertaining the idea of spending the summer in Ithaca, and I was like, 'What? I can make art and get paid? And I have all these ideas that are ready to be explored."

Vache proposed the project that would become Girl Embellish with lecturer Julianne Hunter as her faculty mentor. The two met the previous fall when Vache enrolled in Hunter’s Advanced Drawing course. Her work caught Hunter’s attention because “Safara is so comfortable taking on heavy themes in weird and playful ways. It’s an interesting combination of innocence and adolescence, but it’s very adult.”

“I started with the idea of girlhood nostalgia,” says Vache, and indeed, the audience first encounters the world of Girl Embellish with a collage house composed of childlike motifs and a paper machete house entirely covered with handwritten letters from Vache’s mother—who wrote Vache a letter every month from the time she was eight years old until she graduated high school. “Some of them are fun and goofy,” says Vache, “but some of them are emotionally heavy things.”

It’s an intentionally personal opening to a personal exhibition. It also tributes the women in Vache’s family. “I was raised in a very artistic family,” she says. “My mother is a single mother, and I spent summers with my grandmother, who was an art and music teacher in the city of Rochester. My mother is creative and one of the best writers I’ve ever seen. Being artistic is encouraged in my family.”

From that nostalgic opening, Girl Embellish combines photography with ceramic frames and dismembered ceramic body parts with soft bedroom furniture to explore forces that traditionally confine and define women, while ultimately subverting these tropes as empowering.

“With the soft sculptures and the body parts hanging with them, the roles are reversed,” says Vache. “The body parts are hard, the furniture is soft. It felt right to make the body parts out of ceramics, something you have to fire and mold to make.”

Even though ceramics feature so prominently in the exhibition, they weren’t part of Vache’s original concept. She initially proposed cement sculptures, but those wouldn’t work within the physical and practical limitations of the space.

Even though Vache describes herself as an artist since birth, she wasn’t always sure she wanted to pursue art. Vache enrolled at IC via the Exploratory Program, designed for incoming students who have not yet decided on a major. After declaring for the Art B.F.A. in her sophomore year, Vache was initially worried she would be a step behind her peers who declared art majors earlier. However, the hands-on experience working in the studio and exploring materials empowered Vache to purse Girl Embellish. She says she will continue exploring themes of power within womanhood and girlhood in her thesis project this year.

Hunter looks forward to that and Vache’s future work. "It hits a lot of different media, and that's really indicative of what's happening in the bigger art world," she says. "What a lot of artists are doing is no more sequestering themselves to one medium anymore. I think Safara's really working in a place where art is going."