KIMBALL ART CENTER PRESENTS BETWEEN THE LINES, AN EXPLORATION OF ABSTRACTION IN SEEING, FEELING, AND UNDERSTANDING TODAY’S WORLD
September 19, 2026
Featuring work by 17 artists, Between the Lines invites visitors to look beyond the surface and discover the stories, histories, and experiences held within abstract art
Kimball Art Center presents Between the Lines, a new exhibition bringing together 17 national and international artists who use abstraction to explore personal histories, cultural traditions, and the varied ways that abstraction allows us to see, feel, and understand the world around us in new ways.
On view September 25, 2026 through January 3, 2027, the exhibition spans a diverse range of painting, drawing, textiles, sculpture, printmaking, and immersive installation. Abstract art is often defined by what it leaves out: recognizable figures, familiar objects, or literal scenes
from the world around us. Between the Lines instead considers what abstraction can reveal. Across the exhibition, artists use line, color, pattern and other formal elements to communicate experiences that may elude direct representation.
“I’m always thinking about the ways that art allows us to see and understand our relationship to the world around us in new ways,” says Kimball Art Center Curator Nancy Stoaks. “As I looked at some of these artists’ works, I found myself captivated by how these artists use abstraction as a way to do that.”
The exhibition features work by Anila Quayyum Agha, Chakaia Booker, Tara Donovan, Golnaz Fathi, Nolan Flynn, Magdalena Fernández, Porfirio Gutiérrez, Kathryn Knudsen, Terran Last Gun, Anna Laurie Mackay, Julie Mehretu, Eamon Ore-Giron, Mitsu Salmon, Marilou Schultz, Charisse Pearlina Weston, Stanley Whitney, and Zarina.
Together, their works demonstrate the breadth of contemporary abstraction and the many histories that exist within it, with approaches that emerge from a multitude of distinct artistic, cultural, and personal traditions.
For some artists, materials themselves hold history. Chakaia Booker cuts and twists discarded rubber tires into sculptural forms that retain traces of their industrial past while raising questions around consumption, inequality, cultural identity, and resilience. Utah artist Kathryn Knudsen similarly gives new life to discarded clothing and a variety of other donated materials, incorporating signs of wear and previous use into abstract compositions.
Other works draw on cultural practices and artistic traditions that long predate conventional histories of modern abstraction. Porfirio Gutiérrez builds on generations of Zapotec weaving and natural-dye knowledge, using colors derived from plants, insects, and the land to create contemporary textiles rooted in ancestral practice. Piikani artist Terran Last Gun uses bold geometric forms grounded in the visual language of Blackfeet painted lodges and Great Plains ledger art, connecting contemporary abstraction to Indigenous traditions that have endured for generations.
The exhibition also invites visitors to experience abstraction physically. Venezuelan artist Magdalena Fernández’s 2i000.17 transforms drawing into a three-dimensional environment using iron spheres and black elastic cord stretched through the gallery. Visitors can walk among the lines and move the spheres, altering the composition and becoming active participants in an ever-changing work. In another site-responsive installation unique to the Kimball Art Center, Tara Donovan accumulates thousands of loops of reflective Mylar tape in an organic composition, using the tape’s dynamic and often beguiling interaction with light and reflection to offer a commentary on perception as well as proposing new ways of seeing everyday, industrial materials.
Throughout Between the Lines, artists explore the many ways that abstraction can express our
complex relationship to the world around us. Julie Mehretu’s Mind bend drawings (June), 2025, on display for the first time at Kimball Art Center, feature a dense layering of the artist’s signature mark making and resist a singular reading.
As the artist describes it, abstraction can communicate what is “visceral and felt, but that we don’t have language for.” Anna Laurie Mackay meanwhile cuts, weaves, and layers delicate gampi paper to translate her intimate experiences of the Great Salt Lake into works shaped by memory, emotion, and the experience of environmental change.
Rather than asking visitors to “solve” a hidden meaning in abstract art, Between the Lines encourages looking slowly and following what emerges. Color, texture, materials, rhythm, and scale offer entry points into works that hold deeply rooted stories and ideas, alongside the personal associations, memories, and emotions each visitor brings to them. The exhibition invites visitors to consider that abstraction does not necessarily ask us to understand less, but to look more carefully at what may exist just beneath the surface.
Between the Lines is on view at Kimball Art Center through January 3, 2027. Admission to Kimball Art Center is free, though donations are appreciated.
For more information about the exhibition and related programming, visit kimballartcenter.org.
About Kimball Art Center
Kimball Art Center (KAC) provides international-quality art exhibitions and dynamic educational opportunities for the citizens of Park City, Summit County, Wasatch County, and the region’s many visitors. KAC introduces audiences to the artistic process and the many layers of creativity through its exhibitions, classes, and events. The center embodies the belief that art is a catalyst for growth, encouraging reflection, sparking new ideas, and deepening human connection. Founded in 1976, Kimball Art Center is one of the region’s oldest creative non-profit organizations and a cornerstone of Park City’s arts and cultural community.
