Kim Abeles
Artist and Professor
"Community-based artworks require the ability to remain organic and observant. Every person is an important participant, and though we each come to projects with different sets of skills, needs, and motivations, we are reliant on each other. Most importantly, hierarchies are put aside because no one at the table holds all the answers. The idea of authorship, ownership, and collaboration become fluid, and the depth of the process is the foundation for the result."
Biography
Kim Abeles is an artist and professor emeritus whose community-based projects explore biography, geography, environmental science, and civic engagement. She has created projects with the California Science Center, air pollution control agencies, health clinics and mental health departments, and natural history museums in California, Colorado, and Florida. Abeles received the 2013 Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship, and she is a recipient of fellowships from the J. Paul Getty Trust Fund for the Visual Arts, California Community Foundation, and Pollock-Krasner Foundation. In 1987, she innovated a method to create images from the smog in the air, and the Smog Collectors series brought her work to national and international attention.
Abeles recently completed a series of sculptural suitcases for Camp Ground: Arts, Corrections and Fire Management in the Santa Monica Mountains, that embeds artists in the Los Angeles County Fire Department to work in collaboration with the paid and inmate workforces. The project was funded by the National Endowment for the Arts, Los Angeles County Arts Commission, and administered by The Armory Center for the Arts. In 2018, she was artist-in-residence at the Institute of Forest Genetics; her project entitled Resilience was funded by the NEA and administered by the El Dorado Arts Council. Her work is in 35 public collections including MOCA, LACMA, Berkeley Art Museum, California African American Museum, Brooklyn Museum, and National Geospatial Intelligence Agency. Abeles’ journals, books, and process documents are archived at the Center for Art + Environment, Nevada Museum of Art.