Catharina Manchanda joined the Seattle Art Museum in 2011 as Jon and Mary Shirley Curator of Contemporary Art. A native of Germany, she received her Ph.D. at the City University Graduate Center in New York specializing in German conceptual photography of the 1960s and ‘70s. While in New York she helped organize a retrospective of Gerhard Richter’s paintings at the Museum of Modern Art. At the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum in St. Louis she curated Beauty and the Blonde: An Exploration of American Art and Popular Culture with work from the 1960s to the present, and Models and Prototypes, which investigated the prevalence of architectural and conceptual models as templates for artistic production. Prior to her move to Seattle she worked as Senior Curator at the Wexner Center for Contemporary Art where she organized exhibitions on Robin Rhode and Cyprien Gaillard. For SAM, she is currently curating a series of exhibitions and installations for Elles: SAM, including a focused show on Yayoi Kusama, a presentation of paintings by Joan Mitchell, Lee Krasner and Helen Frankenthaler, conceptual works by Jenny Holzer and Adrian Piper, and accompanying video program. Her published writings address a range of topics from photography and conceptual art, to essays on individual artists such as Gerhard Richter, Thomas Demand, Braco Dimitrijevic, Robin Rhode, Cyprien Gaillard and George Grosz.
ARTIST STATEMENT When asked to describe my work, I usually answer, “Abstract.” Unfortunately, I’ve found that answer is a great way to stop a conversation dead in its tracks. Something about abstraction seems to shut people down on a verbal level, which also explains why it is so hard to pin it down in writing (this statement not excepted).
Abstraction’s “dumbness” is probably why I’m drawn to pursue it; it is generous and capacious, able to absorb and then release a multitude of references. In my case, references as disparate as Chinese scholar’s stones, Japanese gardens, early American decorative traditions, or seventies design. I intend to conjure a world or a space for imagination and reverie in my work that may manifest itself in miniature form or room sized wall drawing/painting installations. My work is driven by a fascination with the life of form, the nature of creation and the will to decorate. I feel reassured to borrow freely from our gloriously diverse visual culture because, as George Steiner reminds us, “there are no more beginnings”; we are playing with all the cards. The true creation, the art, lies in the transcendence of those parts into an animate whole.
-Nicholas Nyland
Hanneline Rogeberg is a painter who works with the paradoxes of representation and language.
I have never been interested in works of visual art that I fully understand. Total comprehension means I stop looking. It is the mysterious quality of Hanneline Røgeberg’s work that attracts me, and where there is mystery, there is the possibility of genuine dialogue. Words cannot contain visual experience, but the back and forth of conversation can sometimes allow us to see more or to see again. Looking at any work of art establishes a relation between the spectator and the thing seen. In Hanneline’s painting, I recognise a quality that I myself am obsessed with — a sometimes agonising drive to break down conventional perceptual boundaries, to resist the categories we find ourselves inside. And because we share this desire, the two of us are, at the very least, artistic cousins, two people immersed in the pleasures and pains of continual ambiguity. – SIRI HUSTVEDT
She has shown in solo shows at the Contemporary Art Center in Cincinnati, the Vancouver Art Gallery, the Henie-Onstad Kunst Center and most recently at Dortmund Bodega, Oslo, Norway this March, 2011, and in groups shows such as the MIT List Center, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a four person show the Richmond Museum, VA, in 2009. She has received an NEA grant in 1996, a Guggenheim fellowship in 1999, an Anonymous Was A Woman grant in 2003, and an OCA grant for a catalog publication in 2009. She is an associate professor of art at Rutgers University and has previously taught at University of Washington, Cooper Union, and Yale University. She was a visiting artist at Skowhegan in 2009.
Hanneline Røgeberg lives and works in Brooklyn, NY and Oslo, Norway.
Nikki McClure of Olympia, Washington is known for her painstakingly intricate and beautiful paper cuts. Armed with an X-acto knife, she cuts out her images from a single sheet of paper and creates a bold language that translates the complex poetry of motherhood, nature, and activism into a simple and endearing picture.
Her work depicts the virtues of hard labor and patience, which is inherent in her process as well as in the images themselves: weathered hands washing dishes, people sweeping, mothers caring for their babies, and farmers working the land. But there is also a large element of celebration, of taking the time to roll around in the grass and get wet from the early morning dew. The need for all of us to lay down on the ground, grab hold of the earth, look at the stars and dream. She magnifies the importance of simple things, like the change of seasons, slowing down the world for a moment so we can actually taste it.
Nikki’s images exude a positivity that revolves around community, sustenance, parenting, and appreciating both the urban and rural landscape, undoubtedly influenced by her home in the Northwest and specifically Olympia. As one of the more prominent visual artists involved with Olympia-based record labels K and Kill Rock Stars, as well as the Riot Grrrl movement in the early nineties, Nikki’s work still embodies the fiercely independent fire that fueled the passion and creativity of that time period.
She regularly produces her own posters, books, cards, t-shirts and a beloved yearly calendar as well as designs covers for countless records and books, including illustrations for magazines the Progressive and Punk Planet. She is a self-taught artist who has been making paper-cuts since 1996.
Fionn Meade is Curator at SculptureCenter, NY, where recent group exhibitions include Knight’s Move, a survey of new sculpture in New York, and Leopards in the Temple, with Lothar Baumgarten, Das Institut, Patrick Hill, João Maria Gusmão and Pedro Paiva, Lucy Skaer, and Kathrin Sonntag, among others. Recent curatorial projects also include Nachleben, co-organized with Lucy Raven at Goethe Institut, NY, which engaged Aby Warburg’s thinking and included works by Matthew Buckingham, Patricia Esquivias, William E. Jones, Harun Farocki, Rachel Harrison, John Miller, Stan VanDerBeek, James Welling, Christopher Wool, and Akram Zaatari, among others, and Entr’acte at Catherine Bastide with Tom Burr, James Coleman, David Noonan, William Pope.L, Catherine Sullivan, and Rosemarie Trockel. His writing appears in Artforum, Bomb, Bidoun, The Fillip Review, Mousse, and Parkett, among other publications, and he received a 2009 Arts Writer Grant from Creative Capital and the Andy Warhol Foundation. Recently released catalog writing includes essays on Elad Lassry for the Kunsthalle Zurich (JRP/Ringier), and Mark Morrisroe for the Fotomuseum Winterthur (JRP/Ringier). He holds an MA from the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, and MFA in Creative Writing from Columbia University
