NEW BOOK!

I am excited to announce that my book, Art From Your Core: A Holistic Guide to Visual Voice, will soon be released by Intellect Press of London, in late February/early March 2024. I started thinking about this book 20 years ago, and cannot wait to hold it in my hands! Here are some comments from my early readers:

“The art world is full of static. In the art market, there's the buzz of money and the fear of failure. In social media, there's the continuous jostling for scraps of praise. In art criticism, there's the fear of a bad review. In academia, there's the pressure of learning, the guilt of not producing, the competition for jobs. In the gallery scene, there's the expectation that your work will be consistent and on schedule. It's disempowering and distracting, and the result is thousands of artists who produce what they think the world wants. This book is like a pair of noise-cancelling headphones. It will let you concentrate on what you desire, who you are, what art does for you, what you need to make. So go back to your studio, shut down your social media, and clear out your library. This is the only book you need.”
--James Elkins, author and E.C. Chadbourne Professor in the Department of Department of Art History, Theory, and Criticism, School of the Art Institute of Chicago

“ ‘Art from Your Core’ provides a poignant reminder to artists that living and expressing their truth through art is fundamentally important, and ever more so in a world where authenticity and the value of lived experience are under constant assault. Kretz draws upon decades of expertise in teaching and making art to offer this invaluable resource that supports the artist-creatively, psychologically, and professionally. This is a must-read for artists and art students at any stage in their career.” 
--Micol Hebron, Artist, Activist, and Professor, Los Angeles

“Like the layers of an onion, Kate Kretz peels back the levels of art and art making through an invasive and comprehensive dissection. Not unlike a scientist searching for the core of discovery, she unwraps and peels back those layers of thoughts, considerations, opportunities and conundrums that artists face making art from the core. Part guide, part philosophical musing, and part “how to” she makes real and understandable the complex and complicated world of the contemporary artist.”
--Joseph Seipel, Dean Emeritus, School of the Arts, Virginia Commonwealth University

"Kate Kretz is your erudite, generous guide to “cultivating the core” of every creative soul. Art From Your Core is filled with amazing insights and exercises—useful for beginners and experts alike, no matter the medium—that will encourage you to look differently at the world, into yourself, and find your voice as an artist. With wisdom gleaned from thinkers and makers ranging from Seneca to Sontag to El Anatsui, this book is a precious toolbox to help you uncover the unique, genuinely felt art that only you were meant to make."
--Maria Elena Buszek, PH.D., Author, Professor of Art History, President's Teaching Scholar, University of Colorado Denver

Pre-orders are helpful! Please help me spread the word.

Article on My Being Banned From Facebook

I've never been one who is able to sit around and shut up when an injustice has been perpetrated.
Here is the article I wrote about being banned from Facebook. When Trump trolls or a corporation try to make your work disappear, use it to show more people the work.

Facebook Bans Artist Who Destroys MAGA Hats For Her Work

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:

 

MD artist Kate Kretz rips MAGA hats apart and refashions the pieces into traditional symbols of hate, such as KKK hoods and nazi armbands. The works are meant to both call out wearers who claim the hats to be innocuous, and to sound the alarm that history is repeating itself. One piece features a MAGA hat disassembled thread by thread, resulting in a large pile of unraveled strands with only the shredded "Make America Great Again" text and the flag patch (turned upside down as a symbol of distress) remaining intact. The work is displayed in a baseball hat collector's mirrored display box, with an engraved brass plate reading "The Disease That Thought It Was The Cure." All of the images from the ongoing series received an overwhelmingly positive response with hundreds of comments when originally posted to Facebook. One of the pieces sold to a prominent collector within days.

 

In the early days of May, several of Kretz's images from the series were removed from Facebook. When she protested their removal, and later re-posted them with prominent text explaining that they were artworks, even more were censored. On the morning of Thursday, May 9th, she found that her account had been disabled. She again explained through the Facebook response form that she was an art professor and professional artist, making work with MAGA hats, calling them out as symbols of aggression and intolerance. As of Monday morning, she has not yet had her Facebook page (a vital tool for connecting people to her creative work) reinstated.

At this time, it is not clear whether one (or several) of the MAGA supporters who objected to her work reported it, or whether the images were censored by Facebook's new anti-hate speech implementation (with image recognition software?) gone awry. Facebook has not responded since her page was removed. Kretz, a several-time MD Council for the Arts grantee whose work has been widely exhibited and reviewed, finds it disconcerting that Facebook lets random censors decide if her work is art and whether it will reach her audience. As Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes recently stated in a May 9th NPR interview, "Mark Zuckerberg is unaccountable. He's unaccountable to his shareholders. He's unaccountable to his users, and he's unaccountable to government."

 

Kretz's ongoing MAGA Hat series can be seen at http://www.katekretz.com/work-by-series/#/the-maga-hat-collection

 

IMAGES:

 

Hate Hat

2019, deconstructed MAGA hats, cotton, thread, 28 x 9 x 12", edition of 3. Manuel de Santaren collection, two remaining.

 

"Hate Hat II, Dismantled: The Disease That Thought It Was The Cure"

2019, unravelled MAGA hat (ripped apart thread by thread), baseball cap display case (mirrors, plexiglass, wood), engraved brass plate, 8 x 9 x 8.5” (working photo). 

 

Only The Terrorized Own The Right To Name Symbols Of Terror

2019, armband made of deconstructed MAGA hats, cotton, thread, 5 1/4 x 6 x 6” (working photo)

 

 

 

CONTACT:

Kate Kretzhttp://www.katekretz.com

cell: 336.266.9678

Several New Works

 "Hate Hat", 2019, deconstructed MAGA hats, thread, cotton. 28 x 9 x 12", edition of 3, two remaining. I am very excited to announce that the first of these three hats will be going to the Manuel Santaren collection. I ripped apart 40 MAGA hats to make these hoods. I will also be releasing two additional new pieces made with destroyed MAGA hats in the next week or two.

"Gang Bang", 2019, four 11 x 14" photo prints on aluminum.

Interview with INFRINGE

I am very happy with this interview with INFRINGE magazine!

Crying Trump Becomes a Meme

Trump called a "national emergency" last week because he wanted money to build his border wall (after promising that Mexico would pay for it). He also admitted that it wasn't really a national emergency. My drawing, “Futile Fantasy: A Glimmer of Self-Awareness, And The Subsequent Remorse” (2017, Prismacolor pencil on black Rives BFK paper) was made into a meme, and featured on Freethinkers United For Change's Facebook page, where it was shared 2200 times. They credited the meme-maker, but not me, so I politely asked them to add my name to the post. I think a few of my friends did, too. Instead, they took the post down. It was subsequently shared on Occupy Democrats' page, where it was shared over 13,000 times. The irony is that the drawing was originally featured in Hyperallergic's "Drawing In a Time Of Fear & Lies" series (along with an essay I wrote), entitled, "Sociopaths Don't Cry".

New Artist Talk Posted on Vimeo & two Group Exhibitions Still Up!

My solo exhbition, "#brute", is heading back home from Coastal Carolina University, and the artist talk was just posted on Vimeo. "The Eros Effect", a political exhibition at Bridge Red Studios in Miami, features some amazing work, including three of my Lie Hole Drawings, lascivious colored pencil drawings of Trump's mouth, captured mid-lie. I also have quite a few new pieces in the TNT text exhibition at WAS gallery in Bethesda, MD. This show also features political work, but all the pieces have some kind of text incorporated into the work. Many of the TNT artists will be doing a reading of texts that are important to them, followed by a discussion, on Thursday, Dec 13th, at 7 pm.

Opening This Week at Coastal Carolina University

This week, the #bullyculture series will be shown at Coastal Carolina University (near Myrtle Beach) in the Bryan Gallery, at 133 Chanticleer Dr W, Conway, SC. I will be giving a lecture at 2 p.m. on Thursday October 25th, and there will be a reception from 4:30 - 6:30 pm. The exhibition is entitled "#brute", and will be up through Nov 28th.

Raphael Founder's Prize

My newest hair embroidery, made with the grey hair of those who have experienced profound loss, will be featured in this exhibition of 26 finalists for the Raphael Founder's Prize, opening next week in Pittsburgh.

Channeling Our Collective Fury

I have a new piece up at Hyperallergic.

“Democracy Detox” (2018), Prismacolor pencil on Rives BFK paper, 14 x 16 inches

Stain On Our Flag

Had to take a break from my hair embroidery deadline to write a bit about Americans lacking the empathy gene for Hyperallergic's Drawing In A Time Of Fear and Lies.

"Common Denominator" Solo exhibition at York College of PA

January 24th through March 24th, 2018. York College Galleries are located in the Wolf Building at 441 Country Club Rd. in York, PA, just a bit north of Baltimore. I will be giving an artist lecture on Thursday, March 8th, at 7 p.m. (click on any image to enlarge)

 

York College has produced a lovely perfect-bound 64 page catalog. You can leaf through the virtual catalog here. Stay tuned for a video walk through, produced by Diemo, that will be posted on Vimeo.

The research for this monumental series began in 2011, the studio work began in 2013, and it is still ongoing. I saw/felt these forces building for years, and have been feverishly working to address them in the studio: the work is beginning to feel hauntingly prescient since the U.S. election of 2016 and the 2017 "#metoo" campaign.

The impetus for this body of work was a search for the common denominator of all the injustices that keep me awake at night. For years now, ubiquitous news of war, extinction of species, climate change, the growing imbalance of wealth and power, violence against women, gun massacres on U.S. soil, and abuse of law enforcement power seems to be permeating and overwheming the consciousness of everyone I know. I felt certain that there was a common denominator to all of these crimes: against children, women, “minorities”, the poor, animals, and the earth. Seven years of research into these seemingly disparate transgressions has resulted in a deep investigation of entitlement and the need to dominate: I call the series "#bullyculture".

Bullying permeates America's society and institutions. Our country threatens any who would oppose U.S. interests. Our children grow up indoctrinated into capitalism, with fewer and fewer restraints on the corporations who control workers and consumers, while destroying the planet we all need to sustain us. Parents across the country pay lip service to fighting playground bullies, while simultaneously tuned in to the uber-aggressive "Housewives of...."reality show, or the football game, where huge swaths of players are forgiven rapes, violence against animals, or against their own wives and children, as long as they WIN. We teach our kids to intimidate on the soccer field, preparing them for lives in the corporate sphere. In parts of this dystopia, open-carry advocates don weapons in public, excited by the power of wielding the latent potential to mow down dozens of people in under a minute.

I am most interested in creating work that mixes up the language and imagery from disparate parts of our culture to point out the common denominators of entitlement and the objectification of “Other” that leads to aggressions and injustices in our culture. How does a trophy-hunting picture compare to a snuff film? How is the mounting of a hunting trophy different than the trophies collected by serial killers to relive “the thrill of the kill”? Why are playground bullies reviled, while corporate lawyer bullies are “just doing their job”? When teaching children to envy/emulate “Winners” and disassociate with “Losers”, how does this manifest itself in adulthood?  What is the difference between feeling entitled to ravage our living earth through fracking vs. raping a person? How is sports culture related to rape culture? Why do we insist on speaking about racism, misogyny, violence against animals, and corporate / political bullying as separate issues, when perpetrators' offenses so often overlap? Bullies prey on those they deem "Other": aren't the REAL aberrations, the real "Others", those who perpetrate injustice and violence? Despite their "divide and conquer" tactics, shouldn't we all be united against bullies of every kind?

I am interested in looking at the overlaps of entitlement and domination in our society, and in calling out the aggressors, the intimidators, and the often overlooked larger, systemic forces that encourage and reinforce this poison in our culture."

I have never had a clearer vision or stronger conviction for a body of work. I have done extensive research and gestated the concepts and formal aspects of the work for so long that I am certain some of what I am doing is completely unprecedented (such as using Bell Hooks' concept of the "Oppositional Gaze" to call out and visually focus on rapists, as opposed to depicting rape as an heroic act (as men have done), or focusing on the victim, (as many female artists before me have done.)

 

The exhibit pictured is currently on view at York College in York, PA, from 1/24/18 - 3/24/18 (with catalog), and much of it will also be exhibited at Coastal Carolina University (with some new work) in the Fall of 2018. 


Individual Works at York College:


 
Trophy / Trophy / Trophy
2015, ink on paper, 13 x 24"

The Deadly Other

2018, photo print on aluminum, four 11 x 14" panels

Rape Stand For A Dog Fighter
2015, ink and photograph on paper, 18 x 24"