Exhibitions & Events Archive - Page 4 of 19

Artist in Residence – Nancy E. Rivera

May 20, 2022 by

A Kick-off Party will be held on July 8, 2022.

The Kimball Art Center names Nancy E. Rivera as 2022 artist-in-residence. Kimball Art Center’s artist-in-residence program supports artists of diverse ages, backgrounds, and disciplines in the exploration and expansion of their creative practices and the production of new bodies of work.

During this residency, Rivera will work on her cross-stitch portrait series and the research behind it. The continuation of that work is a total of 15 self-portraits that trace Rivera’s path through the US immigration process. The source material for this work draws from her family’s archive, which includes government-issued immigration documents from 22 years living as immigrants in the U.S. In this ongoing series of work, Rivera employs passport, green card, and other ID photos to trace the different chapters of her experience through the US immigration process. She reproduces these photos as detailed and delicate cross-stitched portraits.

Taking these photos out of the context of their use as government identification transforms and subverts the traditional readings of these images. A reference to the bureaucratic process of immigration remains but in each portrait, as we stare straight ahead, emotionless, devoid of the context of our location, nationality, or legal status I ask the source material to code-switch from its original context to works of art that explore a diasporic identity.

– Bio

Nancy E. Rivera is a visual artist, curator, and arts administrator based in Salt Lake City, Utah. As an artist, she works primarily in the fields of photography, video, sculpture, and installation. Her practice is influenced by her dual cultural identity and its effects, such as code-switching, cultural assimilation, and displacement. Her most recent work reflects on her experience as first-generation Mexican American through her own history of migration. She has exhibited nationally in a variety of traditional and non-traditional venues and her work is part of private and public collections. From 2018–2021, she served as board member and vice-chair of the Salt Lake City Art Design Board. She was a 2021 National Association of Latino Arts and Cultures (NALAC) Leadership Institute Fellow and currently oversees the Visual Arts Program at the Utah Division of Arts & Museums.

Artist-In-Residence Programming

Rivera’s work will be on display July 1 through August 14 and Rivera plans to hold studio hours 0n-site at Kimball Art Center Fridays and Saturday throughout the residency. Visitors to Kimball Art Center are encouraged to engage in conversation with Rivera while onsite to learn more about her work. Additional programming will be announced in the coming weeks.

More Than A Thousand Words -Artists of Creative Growth

April 29, 2022 by

Making art, one of our most powerful modes of communication, allows us to express ourselves in deeply personal ways. We lay bare our experiences, ideas, and feelings through images and objects. We reveal the unseen or unknown aspects of who we are as we share our stories.

More Than a Thousand Words features work by ten renowned and newly emerging artists who have practiced at Oakland’s Creative Growth Art Center. Founded in 1974, Creative Growth is a leader in the field of arts and disabilities. Their work has established a model for a creative community guided by the principle that art is fundamental to human expression and that all people are entitled to its tools of communication.

Creative Growth opens its studios to hundreds of artists, many of whom have developed highly nuanced and sophisticated artistic practices over decades of work. Today these artists, who have long been marginalized, are finally receiving recognition for their place in the larger field of contemporary art.

From Judith Scott’s cocoon-like bundles of wrapped objects to Dan Miller’s bold compositions of obsessively layered text, these artists’ works tell the compelling stories of our contemporary world. Across our diverse life experiences, art is the shared language that connects us all.

THANK YOU SPONSORS
George S. and Dolores Doré Eccles Foundation
Mell & Kieran Gallahue
Heather & Will Peteroy
Promontory Foundation
Susan & Glenn Rothman
Debby & Rob Schiller
Lisa & Joel Shine
Tomilee Tilley Family Fund
Utah Humanities

Wasatch Back Student Art Show: My Family

March 21, 2022 by

Exhibition Opening Thursday, April 7 from 4:00 to 6:00 p.m.

Kimball Art Center (KAC) is pleased to present the annual Wasatch Back Student Art Show featuring work by students in Summit and Wasatch County Schools, grades K-12. This year’s exhibition will focus in particular on artwork that incorporates the theme of MY FAMILY.

The Wasatch Back Student Art Show is Kimball Art Center’s annual celebration of our community’s youngest artists. All Kindergarten through 12th grade students in Summit and Wasatch counties are invited to participate, creating work around a common theme. This year’s theme, inspired by the work of Maia Cruz Palileo, is about our families. The unfettered imagination of these highly skilled and creative students produces artworks that are both revealing and thought-provoking.

MY FAMILY poses multiple questions: When you think of family, who and where do you think of? What do you know about your family history? What are the stories that are passed from generation to generation in your family? How do these stories help to form a sense of belonging and identity? Which stories are told, and which are not? How do our bodies carry and tell these stories of our families? Are there common or symbolic images of your culture that you would want to deconstruct (take apart, either literally or symbolically)? Think about how you could create a new way of portraying and showing your ancestors, your family, and your culture.

This year’s exhibition will be presented in tandem with additional exhibitions, featuring work by Maia Cruz Palileo, among others.

Maia Cruz Palileo, Wind, Water, Stone, 2020. Oil on canvas, 48 x 124 inches. Courtesy of the San Jose Museum of Art. Museum purchase with funds provided by Tad J. Freese and Brook Hartzell, the Lipman Family Foundation, and Yvonne and Mike Nevens, in honor of Cheryl and Bruce Kiddoo. 2021.01

Maia Cruz Palileo is a Brooklyn, New York-based artist who paints images of a new and celebratory narrative of growing up as a Filipinx-American in the United States. They blend historical Philippiniana stories with memories of their own family’s migration from the Philippines. Palileo’s exploration of their identity and the connection to the identity of the Philippines in a global context, manifests in rich and colorful works that evoke respect for all of the subjects. In doing so, Palileo presents a reclamation of their peoples from historical colonialism and re-imagines her own cultural heritage. Their focus on identity is based on their viewpoint that our bodies act as vessels, bridging the past to the present.

Artwork Submission

Eligibility and Theme

The show is open to all K-12 students residing in or attending public, private, charter, or home schools in Summit and Wasatch counties. Artwork should follow the theme of MY FAMILY in order to be exhibited. This year’s theme may be taken in many directions, and we encourage lots of creativity!

Participants may submit only ONE ENTRY. The entry must be an original two- or three-dimensional work created during the 2021-22 school year. The artwork does not, however, need to be the result of a class assignment. Artwork must be ready to exhibit. All two-dimensional work will preferably be framed and must be wired for hanging. KAC is not responsible for any damage rendered to an entry.

Delivery

Artwork must be dropped off at Kimball Art Center March 19–27, 2022. Late entries will not be included. Both sections of the entry form must be completed. Section 1 should be attached to the submitted piece of artwork. Section 2 will be given to the Visitor Services team. We will use the information provided to create exhibition labels, so please make all information legible. Email addresses and phone numbers of students, parents, or teachers are required so that we can ensure the ability to return work to students.

Retrieving Artwork

Artwork must be picked up May 3–8, 2022. If alternate arrangements need to be made for pick-up, KAC must by notified before May 8, 2022. If not retrieved, artwork will become the property of KAC as of May 9, 2022.

For more information, please contact: Nancy Stoaks, Curator, nancy.stoaks@kimballartcenter.org

Jibade-Khalil Huffman: Parallax Distance

December 6, 2021 by

Upcoming Exhibition Programming

Kimball Art Center Book Club Discussion on March 9, 2022, Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning by Cathy Park Hong led by Paisley Rekdal.

About the Exhibition

Imagine a poem as a video, the flits and leaps of words and ideas taking visual form. Jibade-Khalil Huffman, a poet and visual artist, works across many media while challenging their boundaries, hierarchies, and traditional structures. His narratives forgo beginning, middle, and end, instead becoming endlessly layered and unfolding nonlinearly across a constellation of objects.

With an almost cacophonous explosion of stimuli, Huffman creates a sense of estrangement, asking us to reassess our relationship to the images and text, and to question our assumptions of what they mean and how they function. In You Are Here, a story of reinvention is told through multiple perspectives. Huffman uses the phenomenon of parallax, or the perceived shift which occurs when an object is viewed from different positions. As we watch two women flip identities, the dualities explored within his work come to the fore: the real pushes against the virtual, and passive engagement against immersive engagement.

Huffman’s videos and multimedia installations in essence become large-scale collages, the juxtaposition of disparate elements serving to recontextualize and give new meaning to each image, each line of text, and each sound. His work calls to mind both the installations of video pioneer Nam June Paik and the incisively political collages of Dada artist Hannah Höch, two seminal artists who challenged and changed our understanding of visual culture. Huffman similarly creates a sense of rupture, often calling attention to important questions.

Whose stories are told? How are they told? And what is our relationship to them?

Parallax Distance is supported by Utah Division of Arts & Museums, National Endowment for the Arts, Summit County RAP Tax, Summit County Restaurant Tax, Utah Office of Tourism, Rachel and Larry Gilbert, Susan and Glenn Rothman, and Julie and Bradley Senet.

Image Credit
Jibade-Khalil Huffman, You Are Here, 2021. Multi-channel video, color, and sound. Courtesy of the artist and Anat Ebgi, Los Angeles and Magenta Plains, New York.

Maia Cruz Palileo: Long Kwento

December 6, 2021 by

Don’t Miss our Kimball Art Center Book Club Discussion on April 27, 2022, The Woman Who Had Two Navels by Nick Joaquin

Influenced by the oral history of the artist’s family’s arrival to the United States from the Philippines, as well as the history between the two countries, Maia Cruz Palileo investigates larger questions pertaining to identity, history, migration, and concepts of time. Infusing narratives with both memory and imagination, Palileo translates diverse materials into a novel formal language to describe a new world of their own making.

This exhibition of new paintings and sculptures stems from research Palileo conducted at the Newberry Library in Chicago, which has one of the largest collections of Filipiniana in the world (comprising the collections of Edward E. Ayer, an American who assembled a vast trove of Phillippine 17th and 18th-century manuscripts upon US victory over the Spanish at Manila Bay in 1898; and the photographic archive of Dean C. Worcester, an influential and controversial figure in the early years of American presence in the Philippines). These varied documents, spanning centuries and cultures, offered a kaleidoscopic vision of the Philippines as seen through numerous eyes, and recalled by Westerners.

Palileo recontextualizes these stories, portraits, and images in an attempt to resuscitate these figures from the exploitative gaze of these ethnographic images. Inspired by Damián Domingo, Palileo’s expressive, gestural paintings imbue a sense of humanity and dignity to the subjects. Palileo integrates historical narratives from the colonial past of the Philippines with stories and memories of life as a Filipinx American growing up in the United States, producing paintings that possess dream-like qualities that hover between fact and fiction. Combining Palileo’s extensive research with narratives of American Imperialism, beginning with the Filipino-American war, and the artist’s own understanding of a fractured and complex past, the work evokes nostalgia and romanticism while critiquing the ramifications of colonization, past and present.

This exhibition is organized by CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, San Francisco and supported by Utah Division of Arts & Museums, National Endowment for the Arts, Summit County RAP Tax, Summit County Restaurant Tax, Utah Office of Tourism, Rachel and Larry Gilbert, Susan and Glenn Rothman, and Julie and Bradley Senet.

Image Credit
Maia Cruz Palileo, Wind, Water, Stone (detail), 2020. Oil on canvas, 48 x 124 inches. Courtesy of the San Jose Museum of Art. Museum purchase with funds provided by Tad J. Freese and Brook Hartzell, the Lipman Family Foundation, and Yvonne and Mike Nevens, in honor of Cheryl and Bruce Kiddoo. 2021.01

In Memoriam: Carbon Paintings by Cara Despain

September 20, 2021 by

View: Cara Despain & Jackie Berry Art Talk

Throughout the summer, hazy, smoke-filled skies were a palpable reminder of a devastating fire season. Locally, Parleys Canyon now holds a visible burn scar after a fire that forced the evacuation of thousands of local residents. And all across the West, heat waves and historic drought conditions have often combined with decades of insufficient land management, creating ripe conditions for millions of acres to burn.

For the past three years, Cara Despain has been making work that responds to this crisis. Using burnt debris she collects from wildfires across the western United States, she creates ‘paintings’ of pure carbon—dark, saturated fields that memorialize these increasingly destructive events. The artist has written that the works “serve as markers of a changing climate and exist in memoriam of the consequences of human habitation on the planet.”

These paintings fit into a larger body of work in which Despain has explored the West, interrogating issues such as land use, land ownership, and the sustained consequences of frontierism. Here she offers a critical lens on the history of American landscape painting and considers the ways in which it was often used to idealize western territories, typically for expansionist purposes. Today, she notes, the lands in these romantic depictions have been permanently parceled, claimed, altered, and scarred.

Despain thinks of the Carbon Paintings as landscape paintings of the new American West. Smelling of smoke and shedding ash, they are an overwhelming visualization of large-scale systems change.

Cara Despain bio:

Cara Despain is an artist working in film and video, sculpture, photography and installation addressing issues of land use, the desert, climate change, visualizing the Anthropocene, land ownership and the problematics of frontierism. She was born in Salt Lake City, Utah (1983) and currently lives in Miami, Florida and works between the two. She holds a BFA from the University of Utah (2006). In 2012, she was selected for the Salt Lake City Mayor’s Award in the visual arts, and in 2016 she was selected for the South Florida Consortium Fellowship. Her work is included in Rubell Family Collection and the Scholl Collection, as well as the State of Utah and Salt Lake County art collections. Recent exhibitions include FROM DUST at the Southern Utah Museum of Art, it doesn’t look like paradise anymore at Southern Oregon University; FREE!. at Brickell City Center, Miami; Cryin’ Out Loud at the Center for Contemporary Arts Santa Fe, Fringe Projects, Miami, Slow Burn at Spinello Projects, Miami; and No Man’s Land at Rubell Family Collection, Miami. She was the Art Director for the feature length film The Strongest Man that premiered at the Sundance Film Festival (2015), as well as A Name Without a Place which premiered at the Miami International Film Festival (2019). A short documentary about her and her work aired on Art Loft, WPBT and PBS and screened at the Miami International Film Festival (2016). She was selected for a 2018 Ellie’s Award through Oolite Arts to produce her own first feature film and video installation hybrid, and this year will be completing a public art commission for the Underline with Miami-Dade County Art in Public Places. Writing and research play a major role in all of her creative work, and she often works very site-specifically— researching, casting objects, or writing in the field. Recent residencies include Anderson Ranch in Snowmass Colorado, Feminist Summer Camp at Birch Creek Ranch in central Utah (which she co-facilitates), and Signal Fire Wide Open Studios field research program in the four corners area.