Kate Vrijmoet

Last updated
Kate Vrijmoet
Born
Kathleen Pontoski

1966
Philadelphia
Known forPainting
Website http://katevrijmoet.com/

Kate Vrijmoet is an American artist who lives and works in Seattle.

Contents

Biography

Kate Vrijmoet began formal art studies at Moore College of Art, Philadelphia, taking weekend classes while attending high school (1982–1983). She went on to study at the School of Visual and Performing Arts at Syracuse University, and was invited to teach there in 1994, earning her MFA in 1997. She studied painting with Evelina Brozgul at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston in 2004 and with Richard Ryan at Boston University from 2005 to 2006. After recognition in New York City for her project, 50 Paintings in 50 Days, [1] her work was curated into a group show [2] receiving press in the New York Times [3] and the New York Journal News . [4] In 2010 she had her first solo exhibition at the Center on Contemporary Art CoCA [5] [6] in Seattle, and was reviewed in the Seattle Times . [7] Her painting, Shotgun Accident [8] won third place in the 2010 Ecuador Biennale of Painting, [9] a decision that has recently caused controversy according to the Ecuador newspaper El Telégrafo, which reported that many considered Vrijmoet the rightful first-place winner. [10] [11] Vrijmoet was one of 16 American artists whose work was included in the 5th Beijing International Art Biennale. Her painting, "Naked Snow Blower", a part of Vrijmoet's Accident's series, was exhibited in the National Museum of China beginning September 28, 2012. In 2014 she curated the Social Practice Art exhibit, "The Incredible Intensity of Just Being Human," [12] in Seattle City Hall, a traveling exhibit aimed at ending the stigma and silence surrounding mental illness.

Work

Through paintings, installations and social art, Vrijmoet focuses on issues of consciousness, scale, accessibility and ownership. A student of anatomy since childhood, Vrijmoet has for three decades included life drawing in her daily practice. She is currently[ when? ] completing her Accident series and her Non-ordinary Reality series. In August, 2010, the Center on Contemporary Art in Seattle published a 42-page catalog for her solo show, Kate Vrijmoet: Essential Gestures. [13] In 2011 Vrijmoet's work was featured in a South Seattle Community College showing, and during a solo show at the LANN Museum [14] in Guayaquil, Ecuador.

Her profile was featured in the inaugural issue of the Huffington Post Arts Section. [15] Kate discuses her work in detail in an interview published by the science and culture digest 3 Quarks Daily. [16] In her exhibit book, The Incredible Intensity of Just Being Human[14], she writes, "Art connects us. It tells us we're human, we're like one another, we feel the same emotions. My mission as a human being, and my job as an artist, is to use art to create deep connections among us. Those deep connections already exist, but sometimes convention rewards us for ignoring them. I contend that the greater rewards come from exploring them.".

In 2011 Vrijmoet's installation piece "Mother May I…?" was exhibited at the Orange County Center on Contemporary Arts (OCCCA),in a show that was endorsed by Nicolas Bourriaud, who coined the term relational aesthetics, or Relational art. In 2012 this installation was featured in the largest artist-run, not for profit organization in Brooklyn, the Brooklyn Artists Waterfront Coalition's (BWAC) juried show. "Mother May I…?," — an interactive audio installment designed to address our fundamental sense of belonging — was awarded "Best Installation" by Charlotta Kotik, curator of the Brooklyn Museum of Art. Vrijmoet's work has featured in New York City shows juried by curators of the Metropolitan Museum of Art (Anne Strauss), the Guggenheim (Nat Trotman), and Museum of Modern Art (Paulina Pobocha).

In 2013 she began curating a Social Practice Art exhibit aimed at ending the stigma and silence surrounding mental illness. The Incredible Intensity of Just Being Human has been exhibited at the Seattle Center, and Highline College. In 2014 she won prestigious grants through Artist Trust and Seattle Department of Neighborhoods to further fund this exhibit in Seattle City Hall where civic leaders Mayor Ed Murray, Randy Revelle, Brady Walkinshaw, and Tina Orwall spoke at the opening reception about mental illness. Vrijmoet's project was supported by Seattle Office of Arts and Culture, [17] and Allied Arts Foundation.

Also in 2013 she participated in SEAF with her social sculpture "Poor Impulse Control"- an example of relational art, social sculpture, or ironic participation. In this form the artist exploits the role of the viewer as the art object. The primary role of social sculpture is not one of beauty, but of intervention through discomfort. The audience has an interdependent relationship with the work. Of this social sculpture Vrijmoet writes, "The collapse of the emotional and physical boundaries inherent to the human experience is a recurrent theme in my work. [...] my work directly engages participants communally, even as it remains distinctly personal to each audience member. Although initiated by a single creator, audience participation is fundamental to making my work come to life."

In the catalog essay of her CoCA solo exhibit, "Essential Gestures", Elatia Harris writes of her work, "Any single image from the Accident series will freeze you where you stand. Motionlessly, you check yourself for parts and think, Oh, that's the thing, the thing that happened to me, even if no one sees it. The Water paintings, on the other hand, will dislocate you – you are pulled, plunged and buoyed, seeing up and through and down." [13] Maine writer and art critic, Dan Kany, writes Vrijmoet's work takes a "supremely anti-modernist stance – following the idea that Modernism doesn't privilege the artist/author over the viewer." [13] A show of her Accident Series Paintings was exhibited in 2013 at Columbia Basin College's Esvelt Gallery in Eastern Washington.

In 2014 she published an article The Broader Economic Impact of Donating Your Art, [18] that went viral on social media outlets and was viewed more than 2 million times across the globe. [19] This article continues to inspire dialog surrounding fundraising in the arts.

In 2015 Vrijmoet participated in The Richard Siken Project, in which 11 artists respond to The War of the Foxes, through Copper Canyon Press.

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Helen Frankenthaler</span> American painter (1928 - 2011)

Helen Frankenthaler was an American abstract expressionist painter. She was a major contributor to the history of postwar American painting. Having exhibited her work for over six decades, she spanned several generations of abstract painters while continuing to produce vital and ever-changing new work. Frankenthaler began exhibiting her large-scale abstract expressionist paintings in contemporary museums and galleries in the early 1950s. She was included in the 1964 Post-Painterly Abstraction exhibition curated by Clement Greenberg that introduced a newer generation of abstract painting that came to be known as color field. Born in Manhattan, she was influenced by Greenberg, Hans Hofmann, and Jackson Pollock's paintings. Her work has been the subject of several retrospective exhibitions, including a 1989 retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, and been exhibited worldwide since the 1950s. In 2001, she was awarded the National Medal of Arts.

Marjetica Potrč is an artist and architect based in Ljubljana, Slovenia. Potrč's interdisciplinary practice includes on-site projects, research, architectural case studies, and drawings. Her work documents and interprets contemporary architectural practices and the ways people live together. She is especially interested in social architecture and how communities and governments can work together to make stronger, more resilient cities. In later projects, she has also focused on the relationship between human society and nature, and advocated for the rights of nature.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ghada Amer</span> Egyptian American artist (born 1963)

Ghada Amer is a contemporary artist, much of her work deals with issues of gender and sexuality. Her most notable body of work involves highly layered embroidered paintings of women's bodies referencing pornographic imagery.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Do Ho Suh</span>

Do Ho Suh is a Korean artist who works primarily in sculpture, installation, and drawing. Suh is well known for re-creating architectural structures and objects using fabric in what the artist describes as an "act of memorialization." After earning a Bachelor of Fine Arts and Master of Fine Arts from Seoul National University in Korean Painting, Suh began experimenting with sculpture and installation while studying at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD). He graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in painting from RISD in 1994, and went on to Yale where he graduated with a Master of Fine Arts in sculpture in 1997. He practiced for over a decade in New York before moving to London in 2010. Suh regularly shows his work around the world, including Venice where he represented Korea at the 49th Venice Biennale in 2001. In 2017, Suh was the recipient of the Ho-Am Prize in the Arts. Suh currently has studios in London, New York, and Seoul.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jessica Stockholder</span> American artist

Jessica Stockholder is a Canadian-American artist known for site-specific installation works and sculptures that are often described as "paintings in space." She came to prominence in the early 1990s with monumental works that challenged boundaries between artwork and display environment as well as between pictorial and physical experience. Her art often presents a "barrage" of bold colors, textures and everyday objects, incorporating floors, walls and ceilings and sometimes spilling out of exhibition sites. Critics suggest that her work is informed by diverse artistic traditions, including abstract expressionism, color field painting, minimalism and Pop art. Since her early career, they have noted in her work an openness to spontaneity, accident and marginality and a rejection of permanency, monetization and disciplinary conventions that Stephen Westfall characterized as an "almost shocking sense of freedom."

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Liza Lou</span> American visual artist (born 1969)

Liza Lou is an American visual artist. She is best known for producing large scale sculpture using glass beads. Lou ran a studio in Durban, South Africa from 2005 to 2014. She currently has a nomadic practice, working mostly outdoors in the Mojave Desert in southern California. Lou's work is grounded in domestic craft and intersects with the larger social economy.

Dawn Kasper is a New York-based interdisciplinary artist working across genres of performance, installation, sculpture, drawing, photography, video, and sound. Her often improvisational work derives from a "fascination with existentialism, subjects of vulnerability, desire, and the construction of meaning." Kasper uses props, costume, comedy, gesture, repetition, music, and monologue to create what she refers to as "living sculptures."

Shary Boyle D.F.A. is a contemporary Canadian visual artist working in the mediums of sculpture, drawing, painting and performance art. She lives and works in Toronto.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sonia Falcone</span>

Sonia Falcone, born March 27, 1965, in Santa Cruz de la Sierra, Bolivia, is a Bolivian artist known for her painting and installation work. She currently resides in Mexico and is a naturalized Mexican citizen.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Shilpa Gupta</span> Indian artist

Shilpa Gupta is a contemporary Indian artist based in Mumbai, India. Gupta's artistic practise encompasses a wide range of mediums, including manipulated found objects, video art, interactive computer-based installations, and performance.

Tricia McLaughlin is a New York City-based American visual artist whose works in animation, sculpture and painting often deal with the themes of fantastic or impossible architecture and their impact on potential inhabitants. Her work has been exhibited throughout the US, as well as in the UK, Valencia, Spain, Berlin, Germany, Cyprus, South Korea, and Kyoto, Japan, and she is a recipient of the Guggenheim and a New York Foundation for the Arts grants.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Polly Apfelbaum</span> American contemporary visual artist (born 1955)

Polly E. Apfelbaum is an American contemporary visual artist, who is primarily known for her colorful drawings, sculptures, and fabric floor pieces, which she refers to as "fallen paintings". She currently lives and works in New York City, New York.

Laylah Ali (born 1968) is a contemporary visual artist known for paintings in which ambiguous race relations are depicted with a graphic clarity and cartoon strip format.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Kim Abeles</span> American artist and academic (born 1952)

Kim Victoria Abeles is an American interdisciplinary artist and professor emeritus. She was born in Richmond Heights, Missouri, and currently lives in Los Angeles. She is described as an activist artist because of her work's social and political nature. In her work, she’s able to express these issues and shine a light on them to larger audiences. She’s able to show the significance of the issues by creating a piece that involves an object and adds the struggle attached to it, which represents what is happening in current events. She is also known for her feminist works. Abeles has exhibited her works in 22 countries and has received a number of significant awards including a Guggenheim Fellowship. Aside from her work as an artist, she was a professor in public art, sculpture, and drawing at California State University, Northridge from 1998 to 2009, after which she became professor emerita in 2010.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Nan Hoover</span>

Nan Hoover was a Dutch/American-expatriate artist who is known for her pioneering work in video art, photography and performance art. She spent almost four decades living and working in the Netherlands. She also used the mediums of drawing, painting, photography and film and created art objects and sculptures. One of the main themes of her art was light and motion. The rigorous, minimalist handling of her means as well as the intense concentration with which she performed within spaces of light and shadow are the most salient characteristics of her artistic work.

Mary Sibande is a South African artist based in Johannesburg. Her art consists of sculptures, paintings, photography, and design. Sibande uses these mediums and techniques to help depict the human form and explore the construction of identity in a postcolonial South African context. In addition, Sibande focuses on using her work to show her personal experiences through Apartheid. Her art also attempts to critique stereotypical depictions of women, particularly black women.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Eileen Cowin</span> American artist and photographer

Eileen Cowin is a Los Angeles–based artist known for photography, video and mixed-media installations that draw on the language of mass media and art history and explore the relationship between narrative, fiction and non-fiction, memory and experience. Associated with the 1970s Los Angeles experimental photography scene and the Pictures Generation artists, her work combines familiar human situations and carefully chosen gestures, expressions and props to create enigmatic images whose implied, open-ended stories viewers must complete. Cowin has exhibited in more than forty solo shows in the United States and abroad, including at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), Museum of Contemporary Photography, Armory Center for the Arts and Contemporary Arts Center. Her work is included in more than forty institutional collections, including LACMA, the J. Paul Getty Museum, Brooklyn Museum, Art Institute of Chicago, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), and Smithsonian American Art Museum. She has been recognized with awards and commissions from the National Endowment for the Arts, LACMA, the City of Los Angeles (COLA), Public Art Fund, and the Sundance and USA film festivals. New York Times critic Andy Grundberg wrote that her multi-image work "sets up a tension between the familiar and the mysterious, creating a climate of implied danger, sexual intrigue and violence" in which clues abound to intimate various narratives. Jody Zellen observed that Cowin "manipulates the conventions of photography, film, and video to tell a different kind of story—one that explores where truth and fiction merge, yet presents no conclusions. Cowin's work provokes."

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Liz Young</span> American artist (1958–2020)

Liz Young was a Los Angeles-based artist known for diverse work investigating body- and nature-focused themes, such as loss, beauty, the inevitability of decay, and the fragility of life. She produced sculpture, installation, performance, painting, drawing and video incorporating fabricated and recontextualized found objects, organic materials, and processes from industrial metalworking to handicrafts, taxidermy and traditional art practices. Young exhibited throughout the United States and Europe, including solo shows at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) and Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE), and alternative spaces such as Hallwalls, Randolph Street Gallery (Chicago) and New Langton Arts ; she participated in group shows at Exit Art, Art in the Anchorage, and Armory Center for the Arts, among others. Her art was discussed in ARTnews, Artforum, Frieze, Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, and The Village Voice, and is included in the LACMA permanent collection. Critic Peter Frank wrote that her work "reflects both on life's relentless erosion of body and spirit, and on our indomitable struggle against these nagging cruelties." Artillery Magazine critic Ezrha Jean Black called her 2017 installation a "mordant yet elegiac show" in which "craft bears out the work’s consciousness." In 2016, Young received a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship; she was recognized with awards from the Getty Trust and Andy Warhol Foundation, among others. Young lived and worked in Los Angeles from 1981.

Hilda Hiary is a Jordanian visual artist.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Suzann Victor</span> Singaporean contemporary artist

Suzann Victor is a Singaporean contemporary artist based in Australia whose practice spans installation, painting, and performance art. Victor is most known for her public artworks and installations that examine ideas of disembodiment, the postcolonial, and the environmental in response to space, context and architecture.

References

  1. ↑ Susan Macura (November 2008) "50 Paintings in 50 Days" Harlem Valley Times
  2. ↑ "For the Love of Art". Penrick Collections. Archived from the original on February 7, 2009. Retrieved August 8, 2012.
  3. ↑ Hodara, Susan (5 February 2009). "A Show of Heartfelt, Diverse Works" . The New York Times. ISSN   0362-4331 . Retrieved 23 November 2022.
  4. ↑ Gouveia, Georgette (14 February 2009). "What's art got to do, got to do with it?" (PDF). The Journal News. Archived from the original (PDF) on 26 January 2011.
  5. ↑ "Kate Vrijmoet". CoCA Seattle. 2010. Archived from the original on 24 November 2022. Retrieved 23 November 2022.
  6. ↑ CoCA (February 2010), Kate Vrijmoet: Essential Gestures
  7. ↑ Michael Upchurch (February 18, 2010), Review: Abstract, figurative collide in Vrijmoet paintings, Seattle Times
  8. ↑ "Kate Vrijmoet".
  9. ↑ Clausura de la II Bienal de Pintura 23 Junio 2010. 24 June 2010 – via YouTube.
  10. ↑ "Guayaquil Biennial arrives on the local art scene". El Telégrafo. Archived from the original on January 12, 2014. Retrieved June 12, 2012.
  11. ↑ "Ecuador Newspaper reports controversy over last Biennale winners" . Retrieved June 12, 2012.
  12. ↑ "The incredible intensity of just being human: Exhibit to end the stigma of mental illness".
  13. 1 2 3 CoCA (2010), Kate Vrijmoet: Essential Gestures Archived 2010-12-24 at the Wayback Machine
  14. ↑ ":: Luis A. Noboa Naranjo Museum ::". Archived from the original on 2010-08-03. Retrieved 2010-12-28.
  15. ↑ Ming Holden (June 18, 2010) What Does Ecuador Have to Do with Seattle? Huffington Post
  16. ↑ Elatia Harris (September 13th, 2010) 'Kate Vrijmoet: A Non-ordinary Painting Trajectory'
  17. ↑ "Office of Arts & Culture – Seattle – Arts – seattle.gov".
  18. ↑ "The broader economic implications of donating your art".
  19. ↑ Kate Vrijmoet (March 2014)' Omphaloskepsis
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.