Sponsored by Mission Fed at the Mission Fed Booth–India and Date St. in the Piazza della Famiglia
In October, 2021, Cheryl Sorg worked with attendees to create a one of a kind art installation called “Raining Upward”. Read about Cheryl’s journey to this art form.
Cheryl Sorg de Mollerat has created art in one form or another forever. Growing up, she believed she would be a fashion designer and filled endless pages with drawings of shoes and dresses and the like. After high school, she studied fashion design for a year, but within just a year her mind was already on another track and she took time off to figure out just what that track was. She returned to college eight years later, this time studying photography. She received a B.F.A., graduating with honors, from the Massachusetts College of Art in Boston, Massachusetts in 1999.
Cheryl’s work has been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions in galleries and museums across the United States, including WorkSpace in New York City, The Copley Society of Art, The Photographic Resource Center and Forest Hills Trust in Boston, Massachusetts, Eric Phleger Gallery, the San Diego Art Institute and the Museum of Photographic Arts in San Diego, California, the Long Beach Museum of Art, Oceanside Museum of Art and the Torrance Art Museum. Her work is included in the permanent collection of Yale University Art Gallery, as well as numerous hotel, hospital and university public spaces.
For years Cheryl created art from books using the black-and-white text from their pages. Some years ago, though, she felt a need for COLOR and found her way to using tape and dichroic film — wildly colorful materials that fill a need for fun and whimsy in the work. Cheryl shared that because of mental health issues, her brain does a very, very good job of cooking up dark thoughts. And, as we all know, there is so, so much in the world to kind of beat us down … so much hate and injustice. Her work aims to counter negativity in her own mind, and spread a bit of joy.
The “raining upward” installation consists of thousands of hand-cut raindrops (cut from colorful tape!) pinned in various configurations to the wall. The idea is to flip the notion of rain as a negative (think the Dolly Parton quote, “The way I see it, if you want the rainbow, you gotta put up with the rain.” Or the final lines of Hendry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem The Rainy Day, “Into each life some rain must fall, some days must be dark and dreary.”), literally, as the raindrop shapes are upside down. The installations are something of a rainbow/rain hybrid, as the raindrops are wildly colorful and reflective, and cast beautiful colorful little shadows on the wall in the right light.