Katy Schimert (born 1963) is an American artist known for exhibitions and installations that meld disparate media into cohesive formal and conceptual visual statements arising out of personal experience, myth and empirical knowledge.Smith, Roberta. "Kathleen Schimert," The New York Times, March 29, 1996, p. C25. Retrieved April 22, 2021.Gookin, Kirby. "Katy Schimert," Artforum, Summer 2001, p. 185. Retrieved April 20, 2021.Yau, John. "The Artist as Octopus," Camouflage Ink and Silence, Amherst, MA: University Museum of Contemporary Art, University of Massachusetts, 2014. She interweaves elements of fine and decorative arts, figuration and abstraction in densely layered drawings and sculpture that together suggest elliptical narratives or unfolding, cosmic events.Murtha. Chris. "Crafting Art: 'Making Knowing' at The Whitney Museum of American Art," Mousse Magazine, 2020. Retrieved April 21, 2021.Avgikos, Jan. "Openings: Kathleen Schimert," Artforum, September 1995. Retrieved April 22, 2021.Schmerler, Sarah. "Kathleen Schimert, 'Love on Lake Erie,'" Time Out (New York), March 27, 1996, p. 24.Smith, Roberta. "Katy Schimert," The New York Times, May 5, 2006, Sect. E, p. 35. Retrieved April 22, 2021. Curator Heidi Zuckerman wrote that Schimert is inspired by "the places where the organized and the chaotic intersect—the scientific and the mythic, the known and the unknown, and the real and the imagined … she creates work that exists where, through fantasy, truth and beauty meet."Jacobson, Heidi Zuckerman. Katy Schimert/MATRIX 181 Oedipus, Berkeley, CA: University of California Berkeley Art Museum, 199.
Schimert received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2020, as well as awards from the Joan Mitchell Foundation and Pollock-Krasner Foundation, among others.Artforum. "Sanford Biggers and Zoe Leonard Among 2020 Guggenheim Fellows," News. April 9, 2020. Retrieved April 21, 2021.Artforum. "Joan Mitchell Foundation Names 2020 Artists-in-Residence," News. January 29, 2020. Retrieved April 21, 2021. Her work belongs to the public collections of institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MOCA), and Walker Art Center.Museum of Modern Art. Katy Schimert, Artists. Retrieved April 21, 2021.Vogel, Carol. "Inside Art," The New York Times, June 6, 1997, Sect. C, p. 21. Retrieved April 22, 2021.Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Kathleen Schimert, Artists. Retrieved April 21, 2021.Walker Art Center. Katy Schimert, Artists. Retrieved April 21, 2021. She lives and works in New York City and Rhode Island, and teaches at Rhode Island School of Design.John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. Katy Schimert, Fellows. Retrieved April 20, 2021.McKeough, Tim. "Why Handmade Ceramics Are White Hot," The New York Times, December 16, 2015, Sect. E, p. 1. Retrieved April 22, 2021.
Early life and career Schimert was born in 1963 in Grand Island, New York, a town northwest of Buffalo overlooking Lake Erie.Butler, Cornelia H. The Power of Suggestion: Narrative and Notation in Contemporary Drawing, Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art, 1996. Retrieved April 20, 2021. She studied sculpture at Philadelphia College of Art (BA, 1985), while also developing interests in performance and writing.Artner, Alan G. "She's So Literary," Chicago Tribune, March 16, 1997, Sect. 7, p. 6. After graduating, she moved to New York City, where she worked as a studio assistant to artist Allan McCollum and joined the performance company, Bricolage, as a costume/set designer and performer in reworkings of Les Liaisons dangereuses and Dracula.Fisher, Eileen. "Legend as Real Life, History as Theater," High Performance, Issue #32, 1985, p. 88–9.Keating, Douglas J. "Theater: Dracula's tale retold," The Philadelphia Inquirer, May 17, 1986.Sheffler, David A. "A 'Quartet' of blood," After Dark, October 1, 1986. After enrolling at Yale University (MFA, 1989) to study sculpture, she continued to make forays into other media, including photography and drawing.Rhode Island School of Design. Katy Schimert, Faculty. Retrieved April 22, 2021.
In 1991, Schimert accepted a teaching position at University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), where she was influenced by the landscape and the school's facilities to pursue video/filmmaking and ceramics, respectively. Her first video, Ophelia (1991–1993), featured manipulated images of the tragic Hamlet character's drowning and explored the societal constraints she faced; the film installation Sir Lancelot (Celluloid Star) (1992–1994) directed a voyeuristic gaze on its male protagonist, reversing stereotypical gender spectatorship.Santell, Aaron. "Poor Ophelia, She's Dead," Daily Nexus, February 25, 1993, p. 5A. Schimert returned to New York in late 1994 to participate in the PS1 residency program, and after appearing in shows organized by PS1 and Artists Space, began receiving wider attention for diverse solo exhibitions at Janice Guy (1995), AC Project Room (1996) and the Renaissance Society (1997, Chicago).Zdanovics, Olga. "Kathleen Schimert," New Art Examiner, September 1996, p. 42.Hucko, Leslie. "Kathleen Schimert," World Art, April 1996, p. 93. During that period, she was also selected for the 1996 São Paulo Art Biennial, the 1997 Whitney Biennial, and drawing surveys at MOCA Los Angeles and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.Salvioni, Daniela. "The Whitney Biennial," Flash Art, Summer 1997, p. 114–7.Adams, Brooks. "Turtle Derby," Art in America, June 1997, p. 35–40.Knight, Christopher. "Drawing the Conventional Conceptualist’s Conclusions," Los Angeles Times, November 12, 1996. Retrieved April 20, 2021.Cooke, Lynne. Katy Schimert, Oedipus Rex: The Drowned Man, Chicago: The Renaissance Society/University of Chicago, 1998.
Since then, she has had solo exhibitions at David Zwirner Gallery (New York, 1998–2008),Avgikos, Jan. "Katy Schimert," Artforum, December 1998, p. 129. Retrieved April 20, 2021. Berkeley Art Museum (BAMPFA, 1999),Rickels, Laurence A. "Katy Schimert: Blind Spot and Insight," Artext, February–April 2000, p. 49-50. 1301PE (Los Angeles, 2000) and the University Museum of Contemporary Art at UMass-Amherst (2014), among others.UMass Amherst. "Katy Schimert: Camouflage, Ink and Silence," University Museum of Contemporary Art, 2014. Retrieved April 21, 2021. She also appeared in group shows at Tate Gallery, Pinakothek der Moderne (Munich), Brooklyn Academy of Music and Queens Museum of Art.Riding, Alan. "A Light Look at the World in 'New Art' at the Tate," The New York Times, September 1, 1999, Sect. E, p. 1. Retrieved April 22, 2021.Lister, David. "Art at the cutting edge swaps the scalpel for surrealism," The Independent, November 20, 1998, p. 3.Lippincott, E.E. "QMA's 'Heart Of Glass' Runs Gamut From Moving to Tacky," Queens Chronicle, March 29, 2001. Retrieved April 21, 2021. In addition to her artmaking, Schimert has served as an associate professor of art and director and department head of ceramics at Rhode Island School of Design since 2011; prior to that she taught sculpture at New York University, Harvard University, UCSB and Yale.
Work and reception Schimert's work balances a post-minimalist formal concern for object-making, materials and processes with a strong narrative impulse invoking myth, intuition, scientific and social knowledge, and female bodily experience. According to critics such as Roberta Smith, these elements in conjunction form elusive, sometimes visionary meanings operating "in a skipping, labyrinthine spiral" or "poetic round-robin."Yarlow, Loretta. Camouflage Ink and Silence, Amherst, MA: University Museum of Contemporary Art, University of Massachusetts, 2014. John Yau wrote, "Schimert isn’t satisfied by either an art that is purely visual … or by one that is essentially social in its concerns. The kind of seeing she is after connects looking outward with looking inward, the gaze merged with reflection." Writers often cite the dynamic, varied topographies of her drawings as the fullest expression of the complexities and possibilities in her work.Smith, Roberta. "Katy Schimert," The New York Times, October 2, 1998, Sect. E, p. 37. Retrieved April 22, 2021.Clifford, Katie. "Katy Schimert," New Art Examiner, December 1998–January 1999, p. 57. Critics such as Jan Avgikos and Ronald Jones placed Schimert's mid-1990s work amid a sensibility Avgikos termed "retro-Romantic," which emphasized elaborate narratives, "objecthood" and social themes over the era's didactic, theory-laden approach.Jones, Ronald. "Kathleen Schimert," Frieze, July/August 1996, p. 82. They connected her work to contemporaries Matthew Barney and Cindy Sherman, as well as to Symbolists such as Odilon Redon.
Early solo exhibitions Schimert's early exhibitions offered circling, visionary narratives unfolding in confessional letters, mysterious objects, films and storyboard-like watercolors. They were unified by concerns for formal relationships, the artmaking process, and intersecting themes of tragic love, gothic horror, alienated sensuality and hero archetypes developed around figures such as Guinevere and Lancelot, Neil Armstrong, and Dracula.Smith, Roberta. "Art, Film and Their Brilliant, Messy Union," The New York Times, April 7, 1996, Sect. 2, p. 33. Retrieved April 22, 2021.Ritchie, Matthew. "Katy Schimert," Bomb, Winter 1998, p. 89–90.
The exhibition "Dear Mr. Armstrong" (Janice Guy, 1995) included letters of romantic longing from hyperfeminine characters that recalled Surrealist automatic writing and Concrete poetry—and were considered controversial by some feminist critics—alongside handwrought, iridescent, undulating ceramic sculptures titled Moon Rocks. "Love on Lake Erie" (AC Project Room, 1996) combined the theme of love, notions of the Moon and its mythological connotations of the female, and imagery of the first lunar expedition. Its work included an otherworldly, silvery wall sculpture (The Moon), porcelain biomorphic objects, and diagrammatic drawings of landscapes and astronauts alongside romantic text, all revolving around analogous, barren encounters of astronaut and Moon, male and female, viewed from different points in time, distance and fantasy; an ethereal video, Future Perfect, superimposed images of a woman's speaking lips and stomach in a pink circle with scenes of the Moon landing.
In the show "Oedipus Rex: The Drowned Man" (Renaissance Society, 1997) Schimert shifted to water imagery and softer materials such as tape, aluminum foil and clay, while exploring themes of blindness, oblivion or rapture, and fate. Her semi-abstract drawings symbolically mapping Oedipus's travels (The Oedipal Blind Spot) constituted the cornerstone of the show; its works also included freestanding, biomorphic and vessel-like ceramic pieces, three-dimensional wall reliefs, and an underwater film of a man drowning in a sparkling blue sea.Hayt, Elisabeth. "People Are Talking About," Vogue, September 1997, p. 464–8. Some of this work was reconfigured for installations at the 1997 Whitney Biennial and her 1999 BAMPFA exhibition, which included new drawings and a letter to Freud.
Later exhibitions (1998– )