LIVING WITH ART BLOG

In April, Santa Fe artist, Kate Rivers, creates magic by shaping collected fragments of maps, notes, cancelled stamps, old books, and other collected scraps of paper and found objects into 2D collages. In this attempt to assemblage and understand the language and currency of life and the human experience, her message becomes both universal and autobiographical. Some of the work uses the circle as the primary object and they become rather like bird’s nests. Kate collects and uses nests to inform her work.  Other collages are more abstract and the design and juxtaposition of the materials become the subject. In studying the body of Kate’s work the viewer is made aware of the “magic” of life.  The things that we hold most dear eventually fall apart and/or leave us only to later become part of another creation of lifeKate Rivers was born in Youngstown, Ohio and attended the Columbus College of Art and Design on full scholarship.  She subsequently completed her MFA in painting and printmaking at The University of South Carolina in Columbia, South Carolina.  After teaching at the college and university level in Arizona, Missouri, and Oklahoma, Kate left academia and moved to Santa Fe to pursue her art career fulltime.  She is represented by Matthews Gallery in Santa Fe, NM; Meyer Contemporary in Park City, Utah; and Craighead Green in Dallas.

Also in April, JRB Art at The Elms will feature “The Blues Highway” a series of black and white photographs by Karen Hayes-Thumann.  For two summers Hayes-Thumann, a professor at the University of Oklahoma, has traveled U.S. Route 61 through the Mississippi Delta documenting the blues singers and juke joints that are scattered along the blacktops that connect the towns of Memphis, Vicksburg, Clarksdale, Tunica, Mound Bayou, Merigold, Leland and Oxford. At Red’s Lounge in Clarksdale, MS, Karen photographed Robert “Wolfman” Belfour, at the Poor Monkey Lounge juke joint in Merigold, MS., she photographed Willy Seaberry, as she did Josh “Razorblade” Stewart in Clarksdale, MS and Elmore Williams at the Oxford Blues Festival. This is the second solo exhibit for Hayes-Thumann at The Elms.  In September of 2012 she exhibited a series of Coney Island photographs.

Karen Hayes-Thumann received her BS in Graphic Design from the University of Cincinnati’s College of Design, Architecture, Art and Planning.  She was awarded her MFA from Indiana University and completed post-graduate studies at Yale’s Brissago Program in Switzerland.  Before joining the faculty at the University of Oklahoma in 1991, she taught at the University of Cincinnati, Arizona State University and Carnegie Mellon University. She has been the recipient of the Irene and Julian J. Rothbaum Presidential Award for Excellence in the Arts, the Weitzenhoffer Family College of Fine Arts Peer Recognition Award, and the School of Art and Art History Colleague’s Award.