Carole Frances Lung and Frau Fiber visited the department this week. Carol gave a great lecture on their work as part of the Current Perspectives lecture series at KCAI and Frau Fiber worked with Fiber students on making smocks and mending and altering their clothes.
The Fiber to Form class and other Fiber majors took a field trip to Caryn Miller's farm to observe sheep being sheared. We also got to help out and learn how to clean and sort fleeces fresh off a sheep!
Welcome Surface Design Association to the regional meeting at KCAI!
Two Kansas City Art Institute Students, Lauren Chastain (’16 fiber) and Kara Dunbar (’15 ceramics), will have work featured in the upcoming 6th National Collegiate Handmade Paper Art Triennial, a competition in artworks created in handmade paper. After taking Marie Bannerot McInerney’s, Fiber to Form fiber elective, these students were among five selected by the department to compete nationally.
Anne Q. McKeown of the Brodsky Center of the Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey and Lynn Sures of the Corcoran School of the Arts and Design, George Washington University, Washington, DC, co-direct the Triennial. The distinguished juror, Joan Hall, put together a selective exhibition of 21 works from over 170 competitive images she viewed. These were submitted by 12 papermaking programs at undergraduate and graduate universities, colleges and art schools nationally. The show will be a diverse and high-quality representation of art currently being made of handmade paper. The traveling show begins with an opening February 18 at 5pm at the The Corcoran School of the Arts and Design in Washington, D.C. and will travel to the Morgan Conservatory in Cleveland, OH.
Kara Dunbar, In Pursuit of Permanence, 2015, cotton and porcelain (all pieces except one incorporated cotton pulp at some point in the process), 4″ x 72″ x 3″
Lauren Chastain, Trues Bruise,2015, pulp painting, watermarks, abaca, cotton, and hand stitching, 15″ x 18″
Web: http://corcoran.gwu.edu/PaperArtTriennial
Twitter: https://twitter.com/CorcoranGW
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/CorcoranGW/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/gwcorcoranschool/
Kim demonstrates the super cool new long arm!
With this awesome new equipment from Jennie Frederick who knows what we will make next!
Marie took students to visit local artist and designer Tabbetha McCale Evansi.
The Fiber department at the Kansas City Art Institute recently went on a field trip to Plug Projects. There, one of our favorite faculty members at KCAI, Marie McInerney, gave a presentation not only on Plug programming, but also about her piece in one of the galleries as well as what she knew about the other artist, Sonja Dahl, currently exhibiting there.
A little FYI about Plug:
*Plug hosts Exhibitions every other third Friday (6 exhibitions a year)
*unPLUGGED is a series of exhibitions that occur outside of the Plug Projects gallery space in which Plug works with galleries and organizations outside of the Kansas City area to promote the work of Kansas City Artists in the national arena.
*Critique Night Series happens in-between exhibitions. Crit nights feature a small rotating panel of artists and art professionals in the community who participate in live dialogue (open to contribution from the public) with local artists about their work.
As I am not an art critic but rather an informer, it is difficult for me to give a perspective on the work being shown at PLUG. I WILL share that after seeing both exhibitions twice, I experienced something meaningful and different each time. Both of the installations are very poetic and definitely thought provoking, AND worth the trip down to the stockyard district in Kansas City where you can eat or have a cocktail next door at Voltaire.
Check it.
Author: Rochelle Brickner
Every year Charlotte Street Foundation awards artists in Kansas City a studio residency in one of their two facilities.
These awards go out to visual artists, writers, and performing artists and ensembles qualifying them for a year-long Charlotte Street Foundation studio residency which provides them free studios, rehearsal space, and related support for artists of all disciplines in downtown Kansas City.
While approximately 23 artists were chosen for the full year from 2015-16, with two returning Fiber majors, I would like to highlight the two new Fiber majors that were accepted for their first time this year. These awesome visual/ fiber artists are Max Adrian and Kadie Nugent, both who graduated last year from KCAI, 2015. Congrats and mazel tov!
L - Kadie Nugent, R - Max Adrian
Also, per honorable mention, Hannah Carr and Lauren Sobchak from the Fiber Department at KCAI were awarded a second term with Charlotte Street this year as well.
FYI: To kick off the new studio residency term, the public is invited to meet the artists and learn about their work at a free “Studio Residents Slide Slam” Wednesday, September 16, 7:00pm at Charlotte Street’s la Esquina Gallery, 1000 West 25th Street. This fun, informal evening will feature 3-minute (timed) slide presentations (10 slides per artist) by 24 of the incoming studio resident artists—thus providing a rapid-fire introduction to the work, ideas, processes, and personalities of these diverse artists.
L - R, Kadie Nugent, “Please Sweep”, 2015, Kadie Nugent, “Laundry Day Was Last Week” detail, 2015, Max Adrian, “Act II, scene I: Outcry”, 2015
The Greater Kansas City Community Foundation presented the $25 million donation on behalf of an anonymous donor during a private reception August 18 with KCAI’s board of trustees, faculty, staff and Kansas City arts community supporters in attendance.
“For more than a century, the Kansas City Art Institute has been preparing students to transform the world creatively through art and design,” said Debbie Wilkerson, president and CEO of the Greater Kansas City Community Foundation. “This gift comes from a donor who has the highest confidence in the Kansas City Art Institute and, therefore, wants to demonstrate that support financially.”
Fiber goes to the Des Moines Art Center to see Fiber: Sculpture 1960 - present.
Fiber: Sculpture 1960 – present is the first exhibition in more than 40 years to examine the development of abstraction and dimensionality in fiber art from the mid-twentieth century to the present. Adapting age-old techniques and traditional materials, artists working in fiber manipulate gravity, light, color, mass, and transparency to demonstrate the infinite transformations of this material. Early pioneers such as Magdalena Abakanowicz, Sheila Hicks, and Lenore Tawney spearheaded a revolutionary redefinition of fiber in the 1960s and 1970s, showcasing radical, nonrepresentational forms. Fiber: Sculpture 1960 – presentaddresses the cultural and critical forces that have contributed to the initial efflorescence of fiber art’s revolution at mid-century, its contraction in the 1980s, and its recent reclamation by contemporary artists. Other artists include Olga de Amaral, Xenobia Bailey, Alexandra Bircken, Jagoda Buic, Ria van Eyk, Josh Faught, Elsi Giauque, Françoise Grossen, Diane Itter, Ritzi and Peter Jacobi, Naomi Kobayashi, Beryl Korot, Ruth Laskey, Aurèlia Muñoz, Ernesto Neto, Sheila Pepe, Ed Rossbach, Kay Sekimachi, Alan Shields, Sherri Smith, Jean Stamsta, Rosemarie Trockel, Piotr Uklanski, Faith Wilding, Anne Wilson, Haegue Yang, and Claire Zeisler.
This traveling exhibition is curated by Jenelle Porter of the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston.
The Des Moines Art Center presentation is organized by Senior Curator Gilbert Vicario.
We celebrated the accomplishments on the Nelson Atkins lawn with some food and sports. Congratulations 2015 seniors!
The entire fiber department collaborated on set design and cosutumes for the Friends of Alvin Ailey gala.
