CSU’s GAMA exhibition uses air pollution to create art
Contact for reporters:
Stacy Nick
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Artist Kim Abeles is available for interviews and will be at CSU Jan. 13-16 as well as the following week for exhibition set up and various events surrounding the show, including workshops with community members and artists on how to make their own Smog Collectors.
On display from Jan. 22-March 14 at CSU’s Gregory Allicar Museum of Art, the exhibit “Community Smog” is the product of a partnership between artist Kim Abeles and Northern Colorado community members to create “Smog Collectors.“ These plates — which mimic air quality by collecting particulates from the air — were produced collaboratively with with Fort Collins seventh graders, adults at Petrichor Collective, members of the Air Quality Monitoring Advisory Committee and resident families at a manufactured home park in the Boulder area as part of Air Quality Through the Arts, a local project designed to educate the public about particulates in our air.
On view alongside these community-made smog collectors are Abeles’s other works, which speak to the environment, civic engagement and science literacy. Interspersed are other tools used to measure atmospheric conditions, on loan from Colorado State University’s Department of Atmospheric Science.
“Community Smog” is presented in collaboration with the Center for Environmental Justice and the Department of Atmospheric Science. Support for this exhibition and related programming is provided by made possible through the City of Fort Collins Fort Fund, the City of Fort Collins Cross-Sector Impact Grant, the FUNd Endowment at CSU and the Lilla B. Morgan Memorial Endowment, which works to enhance cultural development and the arts at Colorado State University.
About the artworks
The London Globe printed a new word “Smog,” coined in a speech at the 1905 Public Health Congress. They considered it a public service to describe this phenomenon.
The “Smog Collectors” materialize the reality of the air we breathe. Abeles places cut, stencilled images on transparent or opaque plates or fabric, leaves them on the roof of her studio to let the particulate matter in the heavy air fall upon them. After a period of time, from four days to a month, the stencil is removed and the image is revealed in smog.
Abeles created the first Smog Collectorin 1987 while working on artworks about the “invisible” San Gabriel Mountains, obscured by the smog as she looked from her studio fire escape in downtown Los Angeles. “Mountain Wedge” documents a 14-month effort to see the mountains clearly, and a related artwork, “Sky Patch,” matched the color of the sky over sixty days to compare the same spot in paint.
Subjects for the “Smog Collectors” have included ancient cave paintings, images of the human body, industry, domestic settings of the home and to-scale translations of idyllic landscape painting and photography. Workshops to use the process to discuss the environment were developed as early as 1994, followed by the Environmental Activity Book funded by the City of Los Angeles Dept of Cultural Affairs (1995).
“We live in the contradiction that the dangers are out there, beyond, and that we are safe in our homes,” Abeles said. “Since the worst in our air can’t be seen, ‘Smog Collectors’ are both literal and metaphoric depictions of the current conditions of our life source. They are reminders of our industrial decisions: the road we took that seemed so modern.”
About the artist
Kim Abeles is an artist whose artworks explore biography, geography, feminism and the environment. Her work speaks to society, science literacy and civic engagement by creating projects with science and natural history museums, health departments, air pollution control agencies, National Park Service and community organizations.
In 1987, she innovated a method to create images from the smog in the air, and Smog Collectorsbrought her work to international attention. Projects funded by National Endowment for the Arts involved a residency at the Institute of Forest Genetics where she focused on “Resilience; and Valises for Camp Ground: Arts, Corrections, and Fire Management in the Santa Monica Mountains” in collaboration with Camp 13, a group of female prison inmates who fight wildfires.
Permanent outdoor works include “Walk a Mile in My Shoes,” based on the shoes of the Civil Rights marchers and local activists; and, “Citizen Seeds,” six sculptures along the Park to Playa Trail.
She has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, J. Paul Getty Trust Fund for the Visual Arts, California Community Foundation and Pollack-Krasner Foundation. Her work is in public collections including MOCA, LACMA, California African American Museum, Berkeley Art Museum and National Geospatial Intelligence Agency. Abeles’ journals, artists books and process documents are archived at the Center for Art + Environment, Nevada Museum of Art. She is professor emerita at California State University Northridge.
On view in this exhibition are also Zoë’s “Highchair (Forty Days of Smog)” and table settings created in smog, “Smog Translations” of idyllic landscapes, “World Leaders in Smog,” the installation “Waiting/Watching,” and ancillary works from “Sky Patch,” “Sky Leaves,” and “Mountain Wedge,” which speak to the environment, civic engagement and science literacy. Also on view are “Presidential Commemorative Smog Plates,” a body of work that has been on the road since 1992, most recently at United Nations Headquarters in New York in 2024.
Support
This exhibition and related programming are made possible through the City of Fort Collins Fort Fund, the City of Fort Collins Cross-Sector Impact Grant, the FUNd Endowment at CSU and the Lilla B. Morgan Memorial Endowment, which works to enhance cultural development and the arts at Colorado State University. This fund benefits from the generous support of all those who love the arts. https://president.colostate.edu/lilla-b-morgan-endowment/.