Summer/Fall 2022 Exhibitions
Opening July 30, 2022
(Through January 8, 2023)
July 30, 2022 to January 8, 2023
The Fresno Art Museum
and Barrett Barrera Projects
proudly present
a multidimensional traveling fashion
exhibition examining the seven
archetypes of womanhood.
It's an exhibition exploring new femininity
and storytelling in boundary-pushing fashion.
Click here for more details, images, and our national press contact.
July 30, 2022 to January 8, 2023
Kim Abeles (b. 1952) is the 33rd woman artist to be honored by the Museum’s Council of 100. Abeles is an American interdisciplinary artist and professor emerita currently living in Los Angeles. She is known for the social and political nature of her artwork and especially for her feminist perspective. Abeles has exhibited her works in 22 countries and has received a number of significant awards including a Guggenheim Fellowship. Additionally, she was a professor in public art, sculpture, and drawing at California State University, Northridge from 1998 to 2009, becoming professor emerita in 2010.
Opening July 30, 2022, her solo exhibition at FAM is organized as a survey providing examples of her work in the area of social and political consciousness. Some pieces are very personal while others address homeless women or women prisoners who work as firefighters. Also in this exhibition, Abeles addresses climate change and its effect on trees, human beings, our atmosphere, and the ever-present global smog. These artworks here will raise viewers’ awareness of the many crises facing our planet and humankind today.
In 1987, her work Smog Collector caught national and international attention, featured in Newsweek and the Wall Street Journal and on National Public Radio and the CBS Evening News. Abeles created an innovative technique using stencils and adhesives to collect smog particulates to produce symbols and images. Abeles was motivated to create the project through her own curiosity and the effects of a year-long protest against a factory near her home that she said was "spewing formaldehyde." She considers the work an ongoing series. Several smog installations are included in the Fresno Art Museum exhibition.
"The Smog Collectors materialize the reality of the air we breathe. I place cut, stenciled images on transparent or opaque plates or fabric, then leave these on the roof of my studio and let the particulate matter in the heavy air fall upon them. After a period of time, from four days to a month, the stencil is removed and the image is revealed in smog."
Another major installation at FAM includes Pearls of Wisdom: End the Violence, created in 2011 for the nonprofit organization A Window Between Worlds. For this project, Abeles gathered 800 participants who were victims of domestic violence to share their stories and design a pearl. The pearl-making process required first an "irritant" (an object that each woman chose to symbolize or describe her abuser) which was then wrapped in mylar paper on which the women wrote or made drawings about their experiences. The women then bound these up with yarn and covered them in plaster bandages like those used to heal broken bones. After the plaster was painted, Abeles presented the beautiful pearls on individual velvet-covered shelves. Abeles shows us that "These women are not survivors, but rather, they are champions in the athletic and spiritual sense." Pearls of Wisdom emphasizes that beauty doesn't stem from bad experiences but instead from recovery.
Kim Abeles' artworks are held in these selected museum collections, among many others:
Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin College, Oberlin, Ohio
Art, Design & Architecture Museum at the University of California, Santa Barbara
Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity's Paul D. Fleck Library Collection, Banff, Alberta, Canada
University of California Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley, California
Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, New York
California African American Museum, Los Angeles, California
Carolyn Campagna Kleefeld Contemporary Art Museum, California State University, Long Beach.
City of Santa Monica, Santa Monica, California
Fashion Institute of Design & Merchandising, Los Angeles, California
Los Angeles County Arts Commission
Los Angeles County Department of Mental Health
Los Angeles County Museum of Art
The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, California
The Museum of Modern Art Archives, Library, and Research Collections, New York
National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, Springfield, Virginia
Natural History Museum, Los Angeles, California
Orange County Museum of Art, Costa Mesa, California
Otis College of Art and Design, Los Angeles
Sheldon Museum of Art, University of Nebraska, Lincoln, Nebraska
Yucun Art Museum, Suzhou, China
Abeles is the recipient of a number of awards from the California Arts Council, the California Community Foundation, the Getty Foundation, the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, and The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.
Exhibition Curator: Michele Ellis Pracy, FAM Executive Director & Chief Curator
Support for this exhibition and catalog from the Fresno Art Museum's Council of 100
July 30, 2022 to June 25, 2023
The Fresno Art Museum is proud to present the visually dynamic and vibrant work of illustrator Raúl Colón from the book Light for All written by Cuban American author Margarita Engle. Published in December 2021, this children’s book is described as a lyrical and unifying picture book that “will inspire young readers” and “magnificently showcases the immigrant experience” in America (Kirkus Reviews, starred review).
Raúl Colón’s images capture the immigrant experience and shed light on the many reasons people that come to our shores and the numerous contributions they make and have made to the fabric of our nation. His illustrations depict the hopes and dreams, the diversity and the commonalities, and the importance of acceptance and equity for all. The pictures help tell the story by emphasizing the words that America has been built by a variety of cultures and talents which have all contributed to making it a nation to be desired, to be a part of, and to create a future in. Not always a pretty history, it is our history and is a history we must learn from in order to move forward into the future. It is a country in which light should be shared by ALL who call the United States home no matter where they come from or what they look like.
The illustrator Raúl Colón was born in New York City and grew up and went to art school in Puerto Rico. At one time, he aspired to be a rock star, but to his mother’s delight, he chose to be an illustrator instead. In addition to illustrating over 30 children’s books, he has designed puppets, animated films, and created illustrations for The New York Times, Time Magazine, The New Yorker, and The Wall Street Journal. He has illustrated numerous award-winning children’s books including several Pura Belpré award-winning books (one of which was for the book Portraits of Hispanic American Heroes by Juan Felipe Herrera, one of the featured books included in the 2016/2017 exhibition at FAM, Art of the Word 2.) Colón now works and lives with his family just outside of New York City in Rockland County, New York.
The author of Light for All, Margarita Engle was born and raised in Los Angeles, California but spent many summers in her mother’s hometown of Trinidad, Cuba where she bonded with both her extended family and the culture of Cuba. Like Mr. Colón, she has won many awards for her writing (including a Pura Belpré award for Drum Dream Girl illustrated by Rafael López who is the featured illustrator in the 2021/2022 FAM exhibition Celebrating Differences.) On her website (margaritaengle.com), she says, “I love to write about young people who made hopeful choices in situations that seemed hopeless. My own hope is that tales of courage and compassion will ring true for youthful readers as they make their own difficult decisions in modern times.” Ms. Engle works and lives in Fresno, California with her family.
Exhibition Curator: Susan Yost Filgate, FAM Education Director
Support for this exhibition from the Bonner Family Foundation and the Foundation@FCOE
