This Zoom conversation was recorded as part of a virtual event held Dec. 2, 2020 and is available as part of WAM On Demand via the Weisman’s YouTube channel.
Listen in on a conversation with artist Vesna Kittelson, a vital participant in the Twin Cities arts community whose series of Young Americans portraits are currently installed at the Weisman. Take a virtual studio visit with the artist, along with WAM staffer Susannah Schouweiler, who was among the essay contributors for Kittelson’s newly published catalogue, Synthesis: Lost and Found in America (Afton Press, 2020). Read the essay in full on the WAM website >>
Don’t miss your chance to purchase a copy of the book, signed by the artist, at the WAM Shop!
Kittelson’s Young Americans series includes dynamic, cutout portraits of her art students, which reveal her bonds with fellow immigrant artists of a later generation. Indeed, her intensely varied and prolific artistic production always maintains autobiographical connections. Her recent installations of deconstructed books, as well as her luminous drawings of fountains, recall her childhood in Split, Croatia, where the ruins of Diocletian’s palace from the fourth century CE remain in the contemporary city center. Her early color field paintings represent people and places she remembers through color and abstractions, evincing the focus of her art studies at the University of Minnesota in the 1970s. Her war paintings portray tragedy and emotion related to the conflict in Bosnia and Herzegovina in the early 1990s, as well as her own reactions to the 9/11 attack on her new country, the United States. The brilliant botanical watercolors in her artist’s books result from her research on Charles and Emma Darwin in Cambridge, England. Her large paper sculptures dramatically express personal reflections through color and three-dimensionality.
These many materials, subjects, and genres, like her self-portraits, show Kittelson’s deep engagement with a great array of everyday worlds. Her ever-evolving practice and multiple roles as artist, professor, and colleague demonstrate her strong passion for creativity, as does her astonishingly diverse, international, and rich artistic career.
