Crossing the Line: The Passport Reimagined | Artist Panel Part One
Commissioned by Cynthia Sears, artists Carletta Carrington Wilson, Kitty Koppelman, and Shu-Ju Wang will discuss their work and creative process for our new exhibition Crossing the Line: The Passport Re-Imagined. Join us as they share their experiences individually, and then in a panel conversation moderated by curator Catherine Alice Michaelis. Each artist explored borders and boundaries, identity, and the concept of documentation. Carletta Carrington Wilson’s literary and visual works, Passport to a Past Port and The Court$hip Gazette, document and illustrate the lived experience and legacy of slavery. Kitty Koppelman’s Gender Passport grants permission and offers an affirmation for anyone who travels across the landscape of gender. Shu-Ju Wang’s Passport tells a series of nuanced micro-stories about roots, migration, and travel. Whether personal, political, daring, funny, urgent, or bureaucratic—these stories speak to our will to work and live beyond external controls. Audience Q & A and Artist Party reception to follow.
Guest bios:
Carletta Carrington Wilson’s literary and visual works merge as literary works, artist books, installations and collages mirror the melding of language and form. Peering into a vast unwieldy past, Wilson interrogates how the creation of the past and the scripting of its future inform an eye and shape a mind.
Kitty Koppelman is a self-taught, queer elder printmaker, living and working on the ancestral land of the Steh Chass band of the Squaxin Island and Nisqually Indian Tribes, now known as Olympia. Her work integrates handmade linocut images with letterpress messages that attempt to elevate visibility and strengthen identity, especially for queer teens and children. She uses her printmaking practice as a platform for conveying humor and optimism.
Shu-Ju Wang is a painter, book artist, gardener, seamstress, and immigrant American who twice crossed borders without a valid passport and once overstayed a visa. (But all is well now, she legitimately lives and works in Oregon.)
Header image: Carletta Carrington Wilson, Passport to a Past Port, 2024
Thumbnail Image: Kitty Koppelman, Gender Passport, 2024
When
Oct 12, 2024
3:00pm
3:00pm
Where
BIMA Auditorium
