The Katonah Museum of Art is proud to announce the winners of Cladogram: 2ND KMA International Juried Biennial, on view from July 11 – September 19, 2021. The winning artists were announced at the exhibition’s 1st Look reception on July 10 by juror Yasmeen Siddiqui, founding director of Minerva Projects. Cladogram brings together artists working in written and visual media. A cladogram is a branching diagram that shows relationships among different species and their history of evolution. Similarly, this exhibition will include work that engages with personal or family history, explores the ways in which historical objects and ideas are organized, categorized, and displayed, and challenges the dominant narrative of history and art history.

Exhibition award winners:
$2,000 Michaela and Skip Beitzel 1st Place Award: Boedi Widjaja, Singapore
$1,500 Lisbeth and Frank Stern 2nd Place Award: Miki Carmi and Tamy Ben-Tor, Brooklyn, NY
$1,000 Lisbeth and Frank Stern and Diana and Loring Knoblauch 3rd Place Award: Desmond Beach, Pikesville, MD
$700 LaRuth Gray, Vanessa Smith and Anonymous KMAA Award: Margaret Fox, Sleepy Hollow, NY

With Cladogram, the KMA presents over 100 contemporary works created by 58 artists based locally, regionally, and from a diversity of countries, including Argentina, Australia, and Italy. The groundbreaking exhibition received 1,100 submissions by 542 artists from 21 countries.

Reimagining the concept of a cladogram, and curated with an eye to presenting a wide range of approaches and treatments, the works offer a rich mix of artistic media—drawing, installation, mixed media, painting, performance, photography, prints, sculpture, sound and video. An artist directory can be found here.
About Yasmeen Siddiqui

Yasmeen Siddiqui is the founding director of Minerva Projects, an independent art press whose objective is to cultivate writing about the visual arts through an interdisciplinary and literary lens. In tandem with this work, Siddiqui lectures, writes, and edits; having her work published in artist and exhibition catalogues, as well as on Hyperallergic, and in ART PAPERS, Cairo Times, Medina Magazine, Flash Art, Modern Painters, NKA, and The Brooklyn Rail. Current projects include a book-length manuscript on the subject of home and a series of essays considering authoritarianism through the works of artists and authors.

She is co-editing the anthology Living and Sustaining a Creative Life: The Storytellers of Art Histories (Intellect Books, 2021). She has been the recipient of 2018 Ucross Foundation Residency Fellow; 2018 ICI Independent Vision Curatorial Award Nominee; and 2008 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts Curatorial Research Fellowship. Siddiqui is a Visiting Assistant Professor at Pratt Institute and is a core faculty member at the School of Visual Art at Chautauqua Institution in Chautauqua, New York and for the Master of Arts in Critical Craft Studies program at Warren Wilson College in Asheville, North Carolina. She serves on the board of Voices in Contemporary Art (VOCA).

Support:
Additional support for Cladogram is provided by the Katonah Museum of Art Exhibition Patrons: Michaela and Skip Beitzel, Lisbeth and Frank Stern, Diana and Loring Knoblauch, LaRuth Gray, Vanessa Smith and an anonymous donor.

Michele Oka Doner is an internationally renowned artist whose career spans five decades. The breadth of her artistic production encompasses sculpture, furniture, jewellery, public art, functional objects and video.

Her current installation at the Katonah Musuem consists of two bronze sculptures – Mana and Primal Self Portrait. Part human, part divine, part tree and part mineral, these headless and armless bronzes are at once commanding, monstrous, riveting, even humorous. Fashioned from roots and vines collected by the artist, cast in bronze using the lost wax method and finished with rich earth-toned patinas, these figures demonstrate Oka Doner’s lifelong study and appreciation of the natural world.

Mana continues the artist’s lifetime dialogue that focuses on ushering nature into art, exploring the rich convergence between the human and natural world. Unsettling and imposing, Mana mixes construction and deconstruction, vitality and decrepitude.

Primal Self Portrait has rather thick, even impenetrable, hermetically opaque skin. Layer upon layer of texture forms a protective shield of formidable skin. While deeply scarred, as the vertical striations imply, the skin of the female remains unbroken enough to suggest invulnerability, the indomitability of the female body, however nakedly exposed to the prying eyes of the world.

Her work encompasses materials including glass, bronze and silver and in a variety of scales – mirroring the world around her – from the small and intimate to the large and more imposing. Michele is well-known for creating over 35 public art installations throughout the United States and in Europe, including Radiant Site at New York’s Herald Square subway (1987), Flight at Washington’s Reagan International Airport and A Walk on the Beach at The Miami International Airport (1995-2010) which features 9000 bronze sculptures inlaid over a mile and a quarter long concourse of terrazzo with mother-of- pearl – it is one of the largest public artworks in the world.

Michele Oka Doner was born and raised in Miami, Florida and studied at the University of Michigan, where she received her undergraduate and MFA degrees, as well as an honorary doctorate. Oka Doner moved to New York City in 1981 where she maintains a studio. Her work is included in major public collections including the Museum of Modern Art, Metropolitan Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, The Art Institute of Chicago and the Victoria and Albert, among others.

After a competition that included entries by Richard Serra and Claes Oldenburg among others, the important European collector and gallery director Alfred Schmela commissioned Bladen to create Flying Fortress to stand in front of the engineering school at the University of Düsseldorf. The project was cancelled after Schmela’s sudden death. Bladen wrote tellingly of Flying Fortress at the time of the commission, “The motivation of this form was to produce the illusion of a stationary object moving through space yet anchored to the earth. Not to give one that much time to dwell on it but more to feel as it rushes by. There is a front and a back and two sides but only one direction.”

Ronald Bladen (1918–1988) was regarded as an artistic forerunner by Minimalists like Donald Judd, Sol Lewitt and Carl Andre. But in contrast to the matter-of-fact work of these artists, Bladen’s sculptures are charged with emotional power. Their themes include the force of gravity, the dynamism of planar surfaces, the impact of scale and confrontation with the viewer.