Body, Mind, Spirit: Embodiments in Time

Body, Mind, Spirit: Embodiments in Time
A collaborative project and gallery exhibition by Kirsten Leenaars and Whitney Bradshaw
January 10 – February 25, 2022
Moreau Art Galleries

 

CLICK HERE to view the artists' ZOOM lecture
held on Tuesday, Jan. 25th, 2022
Please use the passcode: f#6Qp?6m 

Kirsten Leenaars is an interdisciplinary video artist based in Chicago. Various forms of performance, theater, and documentary strategies make up the threads that run through her work. She explores the performance, production and intersection of dominant fictions, our collective imagination and lived experiences through collaborative processes with individuals and communities through which her videos are created. Through these collaborative processes Leenaars offers a platform for others to perform themselves and share their stories and visions. Her videos oscillate between fiction and documentation, reinterpret personal stories and reimagine everyday realities through performative actions, public interventions and amplification. She was recently rewarded the Artist Response Grant ($100,000) from DCASE for a public video project with Circles & Ciphers. This project titled A Letter to the City: “jail is not my home” is their second collaboration. The video project is based on letters received from people that are currently incarcerated. Weaving their deeply personal stories through performative actions and image making into our social fabric. The letters are the material for unexpected encounters to reflect on the ways the prison- industrial complex affects individuals, families, communities, a city. Other recent projects include The Broadcast (2019), a video project for the Broad Museum of Art in East Lansing considering truth and distortion in public address and media representations; Present Tense (2019), a multichannel video work, commissioned by Illinois Humanities, in which young men and women reflect on their lived experiences of the current justice system and prison-industrial complex and (Re)Housing the American Dream (2015–ongoing), a multi-year performative documentary project with American-born and refugee youth commissioned by the Haggerty Museum of Art in Milwaukee. Leenaars shows nationally and internationally, most recently at the Broad Museum of Art MSU, East Lansing; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Haggerty Museum of Art, Milwaukee, Museo Universitario del Chopo, Mexico City (MEX) and the Kamloops Gallery in Kamloops (CAN). She has received numerous grants from the Dutch Fund for the Arts, the Dutch Consulate, Illinois Humanities, the Andy Warhol Foundation and DCASE, amongst other grants. She is currently a Professor and interim co-director at the Contemporary Practices Department at the School of the Art Institute.

Whitney Bradshaw is an artist, activist, educator, mother, and former curator and social worker whose practice seeks to empower her subjects while challenging the social systems that marginalize and oppress them. She is currently the chair of the visual arts conservatory at ChiArts (the Chicago High School for the Arts). Her photographs have been widely exhibited including solo shows at the DePaul Art Museum (Chicago), the Tarble Arts Center (EIU Charleston, IL), the Show Gallery (St. Paul, MN), McCormick Gallery (Chicago), Wave Pool Contemporary Art Fulfillment Center (Cincinnati, OH), and Adler University (Chicago + Vancouver). Her work has been juried into some remarkable group shows, including Director’s Choice PhotoSchweiz 2021 (Zurich, Switzerland), Female in Focus, 2020 at the Center for Fine Art Photography (Fort Collins, CO), Dock6 Design + Art 13 2020 (Chicago), Well Behaved Women at the Lubeznik Center for the Arts 2020 (Michigan City, IN), and In a Time of Change 2021 at the Colorado Photographic Art Center (Denver, CO). Her work can be found in the permanent collections of the Museum of Contemporary Photography, the DePaul Art Museum, Columbia College Chicago, Northwestern School of Law, and the Sara M. and Michelle Vance Waddell collection in Cincinnati. Her photographs have been published or reviewed in the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, the LA Times, Time Out New York, Vogue, Float Photo Magazine, and Esthetic Lens Magazine to name a few. WTTW Chicago Tonight ran a piece on Bradshaw’s social practice project, OUTCRY, in 2018 and again in 2021. More of her work can be found on her website whitneybradshaw.com.