The University of Massachusetts Department of Art is delighted to announce Resistant Rhythms: The Graphic Works of Alexis Kuhr, a posthumous retrospective curated by Professor Young Min Moon, to be held at Herter Art Gallery.
January 30 – February 25, 2025
Opening Reception: Thursday, January, 30, 4 – 6 PM
Curator’s Talk: Wednesday, February 12, 4:30 pm, with a reception to follow
Throughout her career, Alexis Kuhr explored the protean potentials of abstraction through different modes of expression. She considered abstraction a valuable tool enabling us to gain a nuanced understanding of the world. To borrow her own words, it was a means to investigate “how we know and ascertain meaning.” The centrality of graphic practices distinguishes Kuhr’s art from her generation of artists who shared this commitment to abstraction. This posthumous exhibition aims to shed light on Kuhr’s prolific, variegated, and virtuosic graphic works, selected from hundreds of drawings and works on paper in graphite, ink, and graphite and oils on panels.
The art of Alexis Kuhr is highly methodical and measured, materialized through careful planning and rigorous application of predetermined procedures, much like the way a master printer operates. Her work often involved various stages of constructing drawings, such as drawing on painted surfaces; using stencils, tracing paper, and found patterns; cutting, pasting, and utilizing layering techniques to work out compositions; and moving back and forth between digital collage and physical collage.
The earliest mature work of Alexis Kuhr evinces her desire to embrace the material culture of the commonplace. She maintained a voracious appetite for thoughtful design, artisans’ craftwork, and complex shapes and patterns found in objects, places, and spaces, both ancient and contemporary and beyond cultural boundaries. In the last phase of her career, the subject of her resistance widened beyond the art realm to address some of the most urgent issues in our times, namely the environmental crisis, the hatred, and humanity’s violence and will to destroy life. The late series Carbon/Ash/Glue is a reinterpretation of the historical comics, posters, and commercial illustrations in compositions that fuse abstraction and social commentary.
What gave rise to the visual rhythms to her intentional, measured activity was her critical stance on the artistic paradigms she grappled with in each phase of her career and, of late, the dire environmental and sociopolitical conditions we are confronting. Coalescing the philosophical with the visual, connecting with the rich traditions of drawing in East and West, yet executed in her idiosyncratic way, Kuhr’s prolific output is a graphic representation of our fraught times.
Alexis Kuhr (1955-2023)
Late professor Alexis Kuhr arrived at UMass Amherst in 2014 as Chair of the Department of Art after serving as Chair at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. In the three and a half years under her strong and effective leadership, the UMass Art Department has undergone a profoundly positive change. Professor Kuhr’s thoughtfulness, professionalism, and dedication to the department have been exemplary for all her colleagues. She was highly regarded for her exceptional integrity, judgment, and superb interpersonal skills.
As an educator, Professor Kuhr was also equally effective, inspirational, and widely appreciated. While serving as Chair, she continued to fully engage in teaching, learning about our students, and improving the curriculum. She challenged her students to critically engage with ideas, materials, and processes of art practice, as well as the current sociopolitical climate.
In her art practice, Professor Kuhr explored the possibilities of abstraction in painting, drawing, and printmaking for the past three decades. In her recent ink paintings on paper, she combined abstraction with the vernacular language of comics in response to communal fears, anxieties, and collective traumas of our times. These works reflected her critical consciousness of the present and the generosity of her spirits.
Professor Kuhr received an MFA in painting from Stanford University. Before arriving at UMass, she taught at Stanford, the University of California Santa Cruz, Vassar College, and Mount Holyoke College. Since 1980, Kuhr held 23 solo exhibitions, including at the Hebrew Union College Museum, O.K. Harris Gallery, New York, and Vassar College Art Gallery, and participated in over 40 group exhibitions throughout the U.S. and abroad, including at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Museo de Arte Moderno in Mexico City, and Museum of Tianjin Academy of Fine Arts, Tianjin, China. Kuhr received the prestigious Prix de Paris, France, and fellowships from the Minnesota State Arts Board and the New England Foundation for the Arts.
The exhibition has been funded by the UMass Arts Council and the College of Humanities and Fine Arts.
Gallery Hours:
Mon – Fri: 11 AM – 4 PM
Sat: 1 PM – 4 PM
(Closed on Sundays and state holidays)