If you could use a little more art in your life (and, really, couldn’t we all?) make plans to head to Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, which is launching three new solo exhibitions on Feb. 3
The exhibitions by artists Natani Notah, Kevin Townsend and Erica Green mark the start of the museum’s 2022 exhibition calendar and will be on view through May 30.
They’re also important for another reason: they’re the first full-museum curation of Pamela Meadows, who became the museum’s curator in January 2021. Meadows was hired after a nationwide search for the museum’s new curator; she previously served as director and curator of the University of Northern Colorado Galleries in Greeley.
“I am thrilled to be collaborating with these three artists for BMoCA’s Spring 2022 season,” Meadows said. “Their works all explore the passage of time, healing and repair, and personal narrative. Although each artist has their own distinct practice and mode of making, when experienced collectively you find a rich and thoughtful dialogue happening across our three galleries.”
Here’s some more information about each of the artists who are exhibiting their work in Boulder this spring:
Natani Notah: Inner Lining
According to the museum: “Notah explores contemporary Native American identity through the lens of Diné womanhood. Featuring multiple bodies of her work, Inner Lining reminds us how Native American representation and cultural objects have been appropriated and commodified by American commercial interests. Notah’s works evoke dialogue and conversation about resisting colonization in the present-day United States of America. Notah follows a multidisciplinary approach as she purposefully marries natural and synthetic materials, such as secondhand garments and consumer goods packaging, in unexpected, potent, and harmonizing ways. The exhibition highlights her series of soft sculptures, which partner worn textiles with faux fur, leather scraps, intricate seed beading, and plastic corn pellets. The abstract sculptures resemble limbs or a body and nurture understanding and respect across cultural divides through their aesthetic richness and compelling presence.”
³/ works by Kevin Townsend
According to BMoCA: “Townsend’s expanded drawing practice is driven by monumental questions about time, obsession, and mark-marking yet often animated by simple, small details. The artist’s meditative works range from intimate, delicate drawings that develop over hours on paper to large, architecturally scaled pieces that evidence days of marking. Beginning with a single line, he draws each mark in response to the one before it. The result indexes a laboring body’s movement through space and becomes a document or record of time and memory. On a micro level, Townsend’s drawings are individual, humble marks that accumulate to resemble swarms, clouds, and compressed typographies. Without a definitive edge or ending, each drawing is a boundless meditative performance that traces and archives the passage of time while existing within a liminal space that is equally structured and organic.
Erica Green: Once They Were Red
BMoCA says: “Green creates site-conscious fiber installations that explore the endless process of repairing and rebuilding oneself. Green’s practice calls to mind a kind of marathon or endurance-based approach to working. The artist repetitively knots and ties strips of wool and industrial felt in a manner that is both obsessive and generative. Each knot builds upon the one before it and sets the foundation for the knots to come. While a knot typically represents a stopping point, Green’s practice utilizes the knot as a symbolic gesture for mending and continuation. As the simple knots accumulate, they simultaneously blend and harmonize among hundreds of monochromatic counterparts, becoming impossible to distinguish. Green’s work is shaped by tensions between elements that are strong and fragile, messy and disciplined, heavy and light.
The exhibit’s opening reception will be held at the museum on Thursday, Feb. 3, with a member preview from 5 to 6 p.m. and a free public reception from 6 to 8 p.m.
“I’m excited to see viewers engage with each of these exhibitions and make larger connections with the work presented in the museum as a whole,” said Meadows.
