Defined broadly as colors, forms, images, and even ideas that are repeated serially, pattern occurs in and acts on the world in countless ways.

The works of art in Pattern and Process encourage us to investigate how pattern can create and challenge our ways of knowing and interpreting the world.

They look at how pattern locates us within our physical surroundings, be it the built environment, natural landscapes, or the material manifestations of our daily lives. They encourage us to explore how we use pattern to explore personal, internal, and psychic worlds, including our emotions and connections to the past.

The exhibition presents a selection from KAM’s twentieth- and twenty-first-century collection, including works by: Berenice Abbott, Anni Albers, Sonny Assu, Jennifer Bartlett, Don Baum, Armelle Bouchet O’Neill, Louise Bourgeois, Elijah Burgher, Vija Celmins, Alan Cohen, Steffen Dam, Harold Edgerton, Victor Ekpuk, Charles Gaines, Gunther Gerzso, Temple Grandin, Frederick Hammersley, Jacob Hashimoto, Gerald Hayes, Jasper Johns, Mikyung Kim, Joyce Kozloff, Jack Lenor Larsen, Annette Lemieux, Sol LeWitt, Carmen Lozar, Ivan Mareš, Jeffry Mitchell, Kenji Nakahashi, Dextra Quotskuyva Nampeyo, Fannie Nampeyo, Louise Nevelson, Betsy Packard, Deborah Puretz, Mavis Pusey, Dot Replinger, Arturo Alonzo Sandoval, and June Wayne.

Curated by Kathryn Koca Polite, Assistant Curator

Sponsored in part by the Sandra L. Batzli Memorial Fund. General operating support provided by Illinois Arts Council, a state agency.

From the early twentieth century, the United States has been home to artists interested in Nihonga: paintings made in accordance with traditional Japanese conventions, materials, and techniques. Early US practitioners and advocates include Taikan Yokoyama and Tenshin Okakura, who visited Boston from Japan around 1904, and Chiura Obata, who arrived in San Francisco in 1903.

Born in 1933, Shozo Sato belongs to a later generation of sumi-e or ink wash artists. He worked in the Midwest and on the West Coast, arriving at the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign in 1964, where he developed a rich and varied artistic practice. Sato is professor emeritus of the School of Art and Design, the founder of Japan House, and a former artist-in-residence at the Krannert Center for the Performing Arts.

Well known for his contributions to Japanese living arts such as ikebana and tea ceremony, Sato’s ink wash paintings have never previously been the object of scholarly scrutiny. These paintings celebrate Sato’s enduring and thoughtful engagement with vistas of the American Southwest, American West, and childhood memories of Osaka and Hiroshima during World War II.

Curated by Maureen Warren, Curator of European and American Art

Supported by Joyce Chelberg. Co-sponsored by Japan House at Illinois.

We gave thanks for the story, for all parts of the story because it was by the light of those challenges we knew ourselves—
= Joy Harjo (Muscogee / Creek), National Poet Laureate

This retrospective exhibition traces Marie Watt’s career in print from 1996-present. For the first time, Watt’s early work from her MFA program at Yale, and her collaborations with master printers at Crows Shadow Institute, Sitka Center for Art and Ecology, Tamarind Institute, and more recently Mullowney Printing Company are exhibited alongside the artists monumental scale textiles and sculpture. This exhibition also explores Watt’s evolving practice of convening sewing and printing circles with family, friends and community members.

Multimedia artist Marie Watt is a storyteller. As a member of the Seneca Nation (one of six that comprise the Haudenosaunee Confederacy) with German-Scots ancestry, her stories draw from Native and non-Native traditions: Greco-Roman myth, pop music and Pop art, Indigenous oral narratives, Star Wars and Star Trek.

Watt reminds us of the stories told by her Seneca ancestors: how the world came to be, what we have to learn from animals, our ethical obligations to the planet, as well as to past and future generations. She tells stories about humble, everyday materials and objects—blankets, quilts, corn husks, letters, ladders, and dreamcatchers—that carry intimate meanings and memories.

Over the course of her career, Watt has told these stories through prints. The collaborative printmaking process is consistent with Watt’s desire to build communities through art and storytelling. The stories the prints tell are personal, cultural, and universal, dealing with elemental themes of shelter, dreams, the earth and sky, and the cosmos.

As a Klamath elder once told her: “My story changes when I know your story.”

Storywork: The Prints of Marie Watt was curated in partnership with the University of San Diego by Dr. John Murphy, Philip and Lynn Straus Curator of Prints and Drawings at The Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, Vassar College.

The exhibition is accompanied by an exhibition catalogue that includes an artist interview with Derrick Cartwright, Director of University Galleries, University of San Diego and essays by Dr. Jolene Rickard, Associate Professor Art History at Cornell University, and the exhibition curator, Dr. John Murphy, Philip and Lynn Straus Curator of Prints and Drawings at The Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, Vassar College.
About the Artist

Marie Watt (b. 1967) holds an MFA in painting and printmaking from Yale University; she also has degrees from Willamette University and the Institute of American Indian Arts; and in 2016 she was awarded an honorary doctorate from Willamette University.She has attended residencies at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and the Vermont Studio Center; and has received fellowships from Anonymous Was a Woman, the Joan Mitchell Foundation, the Harpo Foundation, The Ford Family Foundation, and the Native Arts and Culture Foundation, among others.

Watt’s work in important museum collections across the United States. Selected collections include the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Seattle Art Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Yale University Art Gallery, the Crystal Bridges Museum, the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of the American Indian and Renwick Gallery, the Tacoma Art Museum, the Denver Art Museum, and the Portland Art Museum.

Curated by Dr. John Murphy, Philip and Lynn Straus Curator of Prints and Drawings at The Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, Vassar College.