Ohio Women to Watch Exhibition
Curated by Anu Mitra
One of the curious ways in which my mother dealt with her unresolved anger and grief was to categorize, endlessly. Often, she undid huge piles of folded laundry, the neat contents of closets and almirahs, the details of long-forgotten drawers. To this she would give her full attention—in increments of one to two hours daily. She arranged, rearranged, organized, archived, categorized, and saw new possibilities in how she was going to think about her world, a new world that had yawned into being in a split second before her very eyes. I was all of seven years old, and my mother was in her young 30s. She had a huge household to run—a smorgasbord of aunts and uncles, cousins real or assumed, my siblings who ranged in age from 7-13. The world spun around its own axis while we mourned the sudden death of my father at the age of 37.
As my mother arranged and rearranged her piles of clothes—blouses, petticoats, night clothes, daily wear saris, saris for special occasions, shawls which were separated by make and count and fineness of craftsmanship—something must have registered in my consciousness. This daily undoing and re-making, this Do-It Yourself foraging of a new pathway stuck with me. My mother’s daily unraveling of her world and making it anew spoke of a larger need within her as well as in the viewer of this performative act. She was searching for a new way forward, a way that was going to accommodate her new reality without her beloved husband, my father who was barely known to me. A new world awaited.
As I grew up, I couldn’t help but integrate this practice into my own visual vocabulary for making sense of my world. I too took to cataloging, archiving, listing, and organizing as a system for ordering my reality.
And that’s why, the National Museum of Women in the Arts’ exhibition, New Worlds: Women to Watch, 2023-2024 spoke to me with full-on intensity.
Staged in Ohio by the Ohio Arts Council’s Riffe Gallery and the Ohio Advisory Group, A New World: Ohio Women to Watch 2023-24 is a recurring exhibition featuring emerging and underrepresented women artists. As context, the exhibition has been held in Ohio for the 4th time in this last decade and for the 7th time at the National Museum of Women in the Arts (as New Worlds: Women to Watch 2024). Each time, artists are given a thematic focus which they address. Curators representing the museum’s outreach committees— volunteer affiliate groups which are instrumental in bringing the mission of the museum to their regions—pick a group of women artists who address the topic most eloquently. In 2023-24, 11 Ohio artists were chosen for the Ohio Women to Watch exhibition. Of this group, one artist was chosen to represent Ohio in NMWA’s Washington, DC space.
The 2023-24 exhibition title, A New World, was prompted by the reordering of our world as a direct result of the pandemic. The public health crisis was not the only catastrophe that was called into question, but also the breakdown of social structures such as the family unit. In cloistered spaces, domestic violence soared. Brutal social injustices and hate-fueled crimes, which were largely race and class based, followed soon after. The national elections of 2020 also forced a re-consideration of current societal conditions that seemed to have unraveled before our very eyes. The world seemed on the brink of an impending catastrophe. How to unperch ourselves from this precipitous ledge became the brief that all 11 Ohio artists worked with as they re-imagined possibilities that bridged the gap between the global and the personal.
Co-curators for the Ohio component of A New World, Sso-Rha Kang, Director of the Northern Kentucky University Art Galleries, and Matt Distell, Executive Director of The Carnegie in Northern Kentucky, offered a framework of questions as a starting point: How do artists document and archive their environment? How do artists re-order the world around them? How do artists use this information to imagine alternative ways of seeing the world? What do the new worlds that artists create offer in place of our existing reality?
What emerged was sometimes optimistic, sometimes startling. The 11 artists operated in between the physical and virtual world, between the logical and absurd, the abstract and the real. They approached these spaces with a range of materials, strategies, and techniques that challenged the way in which we see the world. As a result, several thematic, stylistic, and conceptual intersections emerged that allowed for points of comparison and departure.
How is history revisited through slippages in records that reveal what is official versus what is off-script? This question is explored by Migiwa Orimo and Calista Lyon’s field research that results in installations and performances focusing on “ecological grief.” Orimo references “slippage” in her works, which she defines as the distance between language and image. Thus, a walk in the woods during the pandemic introduces her to plants which are classified as “invasive” or threatening. She notices a similar language usage pattern to describe immigrants, and resultantly, Orimo consciously uses the metaphorical value of her field research to make her point rather than its official scientific bearing. Similarly, Lyon uses water as a referent to show collective care. While dams can burst and amniotic sacs can explode, Lyon’s circular installation takes a cathartic turn. How do we create a more compassionate ethic of care as it applies to water conservation becomes a sub-text of her work. A first-generation Estonian American, Kristina Paabus is influenced by her familial history. Her work probes systems of control through architecture and the power of language to articulate both the structural and the abstract. Paabus’ work suggests that we are inevitably influenced by our own history, both shared and personal.
How do we navigate space in a new reality? Sharon Koelblinger explores this question through sculptural frames that intentionally fragment the viewing process, making the audience distort their body to view the work at awkward angles. Kat Burdine figuratively explores this question through a humorous exploration of astronaut Anne McClain—who allegedly checked her estranged lover's bank account from the Space Station—using print, cast silicone, break-up lyrics, and found objects. Virtual spaces are explored by Kara Güt, who employs ethnographic techniques to inhabit and research them while utilizing tools of appropriation.
What techniques do we use to archive and interpret the world around us? Cathrine Whited catalogs objects around her through reduced minimalist shapes until they become iconographic symbols of the objects they represent. Xia Zhang’s set of self-portraits paired with neon words allow the personal to materialize as a public examination of living in fear and avoidance. Mychaelyn Michalec manipulates traditional motifs of women in art history through craft and traditional rug-making techniques.
Lastly, how does our imagination match up with our reality? Erykah Townsend’s work embodies humorous and absurd realities as she spins images of popular children’s TV programming into fever-dream versions of characters that comfort us. The work of Thu Tran transforms objects, food, animals, and body parts into ever-evolving landscapes of GIFs, videos, drawings, and sculptures that result in multi-sensory experiences rooted in fantasy.
The 11 artists of A New World: Ohio Women to Watch 2023-2024 offer portals into ideas and potential realities, which allows the familiar to seem new and exciting, and the unfamiliar to seem compelling and possible. They explore alternative ways of thinking, making, and seeing the world to reimagine our existing world. These works possess an uncanny familiarity that challenge us to look closer and examine what we know about ourselves and our world.
A New World: Ohio Women to Watch, 2023-24 is on view at the Weston Art Gallery, Cincinnati, April 5-June 9, 2024.
The Southern Ohio Museum and Cultural Center, Portsmouth, July 11-September 7, 2024.
Sharon Koelblinger
Sharon Koelblinger lives and works in Kent, Ohio. She works to offer an alternative to the standard narrative of the collective declining attention span at a time when photographic imagery saturates our waking life. Her objects intentionally slow the process of looking at photographs and draw viewers’ awareness to their own gaze and the space their bodies occupy. Koelblinger makes photographs that describe what is often missing from a single perspective: fragments caught in a passing glance, architecture that keeps neighbors distant, and memories fraught with omissions. By emphasizing the in-between moments of human vision, she aims to re-engage viewers in the uncanny spaces unconsciously lost at the edge of our periphery. Recent bodies of work incorporate mirrors and sculptural frames to simultaneously obscure and activate her photographs. The viewer becomes an active participant in “completing” the image.
Koelblinger received an MFA in photography from the Tyler School of Art at Temple University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She has held recent exhibitions with Vox Populi in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; ACRE Projects in Chicago, Illinois; Common Grounds Gallery at VisArts in Rockville, Maryland; and The Delaware Contemporary in Wilmington, Delaware. Recent residencies include the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts in Nebraska City, Nebraska, and I-Park in Connecticut. Koelblinger was a 2021 Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award recipient.
Kat Burdine is a Cleveland, Ohio, artist who takes an experimental approach to object-making, producing what they refer to as “failed prints and objects.” By sabotaging standard modes of production and processes, Burdine leaves space for invention, chaos, and play. Their work is often tactile or participatory and moves the viewer through the gallery with a keen eye toward detail and finish. Burdine’s objects and installations also question and investigate socially assigned narratives. The body of work “Lesbian Space Crime” uses all these strategies to examine lonely hearts in exceptional circumstances and what that means for our dreams of Utopia.
Burdine holds an MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan. Burdine has participated in residencies with SPACES in Cleveland, Ohio, and Talking Dolls in Detroit, Michigan. They have exhibited extensively throughout the Midwest and beyond. Recent exhibitions include projects with the Simone DeSousa Gallery in Detroit, Michigan; Concordia University in Montreal, Canada; Ipso Gallery in Sioux Falls, South Dakota; Cleveland Institute of Art in Cleveland, Ohio; Richard D. Baron ’64 Art Gallery in Oberlin, Ohio; Backspace Gallery in Madison, Wisconsin; and Kink Contemporary in Cleveland, Ohio. Burdine has most recently taught at the Cleveland Institute of Art and Oberlin College.
Kara Güt
Kara Güt is a multidisciplinary artist working in image-based digital media based in North Olmsted, Ohio. Her work investigates the shape of human intimacy formed by internet lifestyle, constructed detachment from reality, and the power dynamics of the virtual. Güt often utilizes the visual language of fantasy role-playing video games as a tool to illustrate our complicated relationship with mediation. With an interest in the strategies used to exist within virtual systems, she appropriates consumer programs, applications, and games as ad hoc containers for a new creation. Fan tactics like modding and worldbuilding are employed to augment or subvert the original content, often crafting a new narrative of longing and desire, or existential dread and stasis.
Güt’s work has been shown internationally, including projects with HYBRID Box, Hellerau European Centre for the Arts in Dresden, Germany; Hesse Flatow in New York City; Las Cigarreras Cultural Centre in Alicante, Spain; Azkuna Zentroa, formerly known as Alhóndiga Bilbao, in Bilbao, Spain; Pioneer Works in Brooklyn, New York; and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Detroit, Michigan. She received an MFA from the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, and is an alum of the Pioneer Works Tech Residency, the SPACES artist residency, and the Banff Visual + Digital Art residency. Güt is the recipient of two Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Awards, in 2021 and 2023, and was also awarded the SPACES Artist Forward Fund in 2021.
Migiwa Orimo lives and works in Yellow Springs, Ohio, and is an interdisciplinary artist using notions of gap, slippage, and "a realm of disjunction" as a point of entry. Her work explores what lies between "shown and hidden" and "public and private." Orimo typically works in installation-based art. Her projects are thoughtful explorations of complex and thorny issues and often take the shape of an archive as a metaphor for retaining memory. Equally important to Orimo are the ways in which memory can be displaced or internalized to create overlapping or competing collective narratives. In turn, these memories and archives can become physical manifestations of a metaphysical process.
Orimo was born and raised in Tokyo, Japan. She received a degree in literature and studied graphic design in Japan before immigrating to the United States in the 1980s. Her work has been shown extensively, including at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C.; San Bernardino Art Museum in San Bernadino, California; University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill's Allcott Gallery in Chapel Hill, North Carolina; and apexart in New York City. In Ohio, her work has been shown at the Springfield Art Museum, Dayton Art Institute, Ohio State University’s Urban Arts Space, Ohio Arts Council’s Riffe Gallery, Oberlin College's Baron Gallery, and Weston Art Gallery in Cincinnati. Orimo has received an Ohio Arts Council’s Individual Excellence Award five times, in 1996, 2004, 2008, 2013, and 2021.
Calista Lyon
Calista Lyon is an Australian artist based in Columbus, Ohio. Lyon leverages a research-based practice to tackle ongoing and overlapping projects that traverse continents and generations. How we collectively confront our ecologies gives way to metaphor and allegory about how we also confront ourselves and each other. Breaking Water, and much of Lyon’s work, centers on the human experience of what psychologists have termed ecological grief, which refers to the sense of loss, fear, sadness, and dread that arises from experiencing or learning about environmental destruction. Lyon and her collaborator, Carmen Winant, asked: How might human experiences with water signal a shift in consciousness away from helplessness, denial, and paralysis toward something like awake-ness and action in addressing ecological imperatives?
Lyon received a BA in studio art from California State University in Los Angeles, California, and an MFA in photography from The Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio. Her works have been featured in solo exhibitions at the Ruffin Gallery in Charlottesville, Virginia, and the Murray Art Museum in Albury, Australia. Lyon has also participated in several group exhibitions, including Breaking Water: Liquidity as Method at the Contemporary Art Center in Cincinnati, Ohio; Head On Portrait Prize at the Sydney Museum in Australia (2017); Cultivating a Garden off Grid in Columbus, Ohio; and Orchids: Attraction and Deception at the Barry Art Museum in Norfolk, Virginia.
Kristina Paabus
Kristina Paabus, based in Cleveland, Ohio, and uses a multidisciplinary approach to form hybrid spatial conversations that observe, interpret, and respond to experiences of attempted containment. Through abstraction and metaphor, she creates actual and depicted spaces of somewhat recognizable, yet precarious situations. These explorations of the operations, fractures, and perceptions of these systems allow Paabus to uncover underlying common codes within our shared experiences. As a first-generation Estonian-American, Paabus has a particular interest in understanding the effects of occupation and resilience, while also contextualizing and analyzing contemporary global narratives. Her research in post-Soviet countries has provided firsthand visual evidence into cultural and built spaces. The resulting works unpack architectural experiences that describe histories of power and restriction.
Paabus earned her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and currently serves as associate professor of reproducible media at Oberlin College in Oberlin, Ohio. Her work can be found in many public and private collections, and it has been exhibited throughout the United States, Europe, and China. Recent solo exhibitions include Meanwhile at Hobusepea Galerii in Tallinn, Estonia, and Something to Believe In at the McDonough Museum of Art in Youngstown, Ohio. Paabus has participated in numerous artist residencies. Additionally, she is the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship for Installation Art in Estonia, the Grant Wood Fellowship in Printmaking at the University of Iowa in Iowa City, Iowa, and an Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award.
Cathrine Whited lives and works in Cincinnati, Ohio. Her subjects range from household objects to food to fictional characters. Her work can become a way of processing, understanding, and collecting pieces of our culture commonly overlooked, mirroring our lives and the objects with which we are surrounded. Each rendering typically depicts one character or unit and is labeled akin to a scientific journal. When one drawing is complete, it is checked off the list. Cataloging something like a slice of cheese, for instance, can be humorous at first but also quickly becomes something confrontational and unavoidable. Experiencing the drawing collections together begins to tell a different story, expanding the meaning beyond humor into something greater.
Whited is a self-taught artist who has exhibited with Western Exhibitions in Chicago, Illinois; Outsider Art Fair in New York City; Summertime Gallery in Brooklyn, New York; The Carnegie in Covington, Kentucky; and at the 1628 Gallery, People’s Liberty, and WavePool Gallery—all in Cincinnati, Ohio. Whited’s work was recently featured on Bounty paper towels as a design collaboration between Proctor & Gamble and Visionaries + Voices, the progressive arts studio where Whited is a participating artist.
Xia Zhang
Xia Zhang is a multi-disciplinary artist based in Cincinnati, Ohio. Her work is rooted in both autobiography and observation. A life and career largely spent within white-dominated communities has provided a vantage point to comment on otherness and belonging. Zhang frequently creates narrative discomfort through both image and text, reflecting on trauma and the barriers created to guard against trauma. Zhang also navigates the spaces between materials and processes. Her work moves seamlessly among craft, photography, performance, and installation, always seeking the proper media to support the narrative arc of each concept.
Zhang earned her MFA from West Virginia University in Morgantown in 2015 and has exhibited extensively throughout the United States. Recent and upcoming exhibitions include projects with Candela Gallery in Richmond, Virginia; Denny Dimin Gallery in New York City; WavePool Gallery in Cincinnati, Ohio; New Harmony Gallery in Evansville, Indiana; Weston Art Gallery in Cincinnati, Ohio; Jessica Silverman Gallery in San Francisco, California; The Carnegie in Covington, Kentucky; Thompson Art Gallery at Furman University in Greenville County, South Carolina; Ruth Candler Williamson Gallery in Claremont, California; and the Cincinnati Art Museum. Zhang also been awarded residencies at The Growlery in San Francisco, California; Vermont Studio Center in Johnson, Vermont; and Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts in Gatlinburg, Tennessee. Zhang is an assistant professor of art at the University of Cincinnati and was the Alice C. Cole Visiting Artist at Wellesley College in Massachusetts in 2017.
Mychaelyn Michalec is a fiber artist and painter working in Dayton, Ohio. Her work explores the uneasiness of coming out of a domestic coma midlife to a place of confusion. As a Gen X female, Michalec observes that she was a member of the first generation to be told that they could “have it all.” But many do not “have it all,” and if that is attained, at what price? Using domestic craft and traditional rug-making techniques (women’s work, if you will), Michalec’s recent work is about the effects of time on the body, self-identity, and relationships with family members as they move through new phases in their lives. The advent of motherhood is a familiar motif in the history of art, but the narrative of women's lives seems to stop there.
Michalec earned a BFA with distinction in painting and drawing and a BA in art history from The Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio, and an MLIS from the University of Southern Mississippi in Hattiesburg, Mississippi. She has shown her work internationally and has been awarded residencies at The Vermont Studio Center in Johnson, Vermont; the Sam and Adele Golden Foundation for the Arts Residency in New Berlin, New York; and the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts in Nebraska City, Nebraska. Michalec is a 2021 recipient of an Individual Excellence Award from the Ohio Arts Council. Her work was recently acquired by The Bunker Art Space in West Palm Beach, Florida.
Erykah Townsend is a conceptual artist based in Cleveland, Ohio. Her paintings and objects are heavily influenced by pop culture and her life-long experience of absorbing all types of mainstream media. Pop culture becomes the actual material she manipulates into familiar yet uncomfortable images. Townsend believes that some fictional characters and icons are so embedded in pop culture that they take place in the real world. Similar to René Magritte's, The Treachery of Images, the pipe is a pipe, but it's also just a painting of a pipe. Mickey Mouse is a mouse, but he’s also just an animated character, albeit one with a physical presence in the world like a real mouse. Townsend reckons there's no valuable difference between painting a fictional character like Big Bird or a real canary because they both take place in our culture and clearly communicate their form or existence.
Townsend received a BFA from the Cleveland Institute of Art in 2020. Townsend was a 2022 moCa AIR Artist-in-Residence at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Cleveland, Ohio, where she had a solo exhibition from October through December 2023. Her work has been exhibited at the Akron Art Museum in Akron, Ohio; Future DMND in West Hollywood, California; and at Abbatoir Gallery, SPACES, and Newsense Enterprises—all in Cleveland, Ohio. In 2022, Townsend was awarded the FRONT Art Futures Fellowship and will present her work in the 2025 Front Triennial.
Thu Tran
Thu Tran is an illustrator and interdisciplinary performance and installation artist based in Cleveland, Ohio. Tran uses physical and digital artifacts that playfully explore distortions in memory that exaggerate and contradict reality. These humorous recollections are seen through looping GIFs of cats; an assemblage of hoarded items; and outdated modes of technology grounded in nostalgia, expressions of endearment, and absurdity. Tran gravitates towards the graphic clarity of cartoons and aims to strike a balance between visual efficiency and density in materials.
Tran wrote, produced, designed, and starred in Food Party—which aired for two seasons on the Independent Film Channel (IFC). Tran received a BFA from the Cleveland Institute of Art in 2005. She has been a guest lecturer and faculty member at several institutions, including the School of Visual Arts in New York City; Yale School of Sculpture in New Haven, Connecticut; Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, Maryland; and University of New Hampshire in Durham, New Hampshire. Tran’s work is frequently collaborative, and she has produced work for numerous clients and institutions, including the Museum of Moving Images, Super Deluxe, Hewlett-Packard, Google/Motorola, MTV, and Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio.
Bader + Simon is a national arts organization based in Cincinnati that inspires conversations about the world through the art of underrepresented artists.
Episode 35 on B+S w/ Friends podcast.
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