Gwendolyn Kerber and Rocío Olivares
Curated by Annette Cyr and Rebecca Shippee
Closing Reception: Tuesday, July 19, 2022; 6:00PM – 8:00PM
Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture and the Skowhegan Alumni Alliance are excited to announce CONFERENCE CALL: a series of five 2-person exhibitions featuring the work of Skowhegan alumni that will run from May through November 2022.
Established in 1946, Skowhegan is an intensive summer residency program for artists which takes place annually in Madison, Maine. The exhibition series will take place at Skowhegan's New York space in Chelsea. The second exhibition will open on June 20, 2022 featuring the work of Gwendolyn Kerber (A '79) and Rocío Olivares (A '18) organized by Alliance members and alumni, Annette Cyr (A '76, '21) and Rebecca Shippee (A '18).
Gwendolyn Kerber writes of her on-site painting process “I am standing in the pond up to my knees … no longer a vista but the very place where our human bodies meet the natural world.” Rocío Olivares creates scaled down facsimiles of suburban in-ground pools. She describes herself “reflecting on the execution of a desire of domain that private pools crystalize, looking at pools as a fantasy exercised over nature.” The exhibition will put in conversation two divergent approaches to water, containment and expansion.
About Gwendolyn Kerber
Gwendolyn Kerber is an American painter based in Berlin and Bucks County, PA. She holds an M.F.A. in painting from Yale University, a B.F.A. from the Cleveland Institute of Art and a B.A. from Hampshire College. Kerber has been the recipient of several awards and residencies, including The Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (1979), a residency at the Vermont Studio Center (2013), The Dagaocun Artist in Residency Programme in Beijing (2008) and The Berlin Collective Artist Residency Program at the APT studios in Brooklyn (2014). Her work has been exhibited in Berlin, New York, Philadelphia and in Beijing. In 2013 she was a Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant recipient.
About Rocío Olivares
Rocío Olivares is an interdisciplinary artist and educator born in 1990 in Santiago de Chile. She received her BFA from Universidad Católica de Chile and a MFA from Columbia University. Her work has been exhibited in places such as Dilalica (Barcelona, Spain); The Place (Barcelona, Spain); the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts (New York, USA); Museum of the Moving Image (New York, USA); Drawing Center (New York, USA); Cindy Rucker Gallery (New York, USA); MuseumsQuartier (Vienna, Austria); Marinaro Gallery (New York, USA); Sean Kelly Gallery (New York, USA); the Jewish Museum (New York, USA); Mana Contemporary (New Jersey, USA); LeRoy Neiman Gallery (New York, USA); Museum of Visual Arts (Santiago, Chile); Bicentenario Gallery, Mapocho Station (Santiago, Chile); Museum of Contemporary Art, Quinta Normal (Santiago, Chile), among others. Rocío has been a resident of the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (2018) and the Whitney Independent Study Program during 2018-2019. She was a recipient of Fulbright Scholarships and Chile Scholarships for Master's studies abroad. She currently lives and works in Santiago de Chile.
CONFERENCE CALL | Exhibition Series 2022 aims to place work by artists from different Skowhegan cohorts in conversation with each other, and with the labor of operating a residency. It will feature the works of Skowhegan alumni: Pío Galbis (A '82, '21) and Buster Graybill (A '07); Gwendolyn Kerber (A '79) and Rocío Olivares (A '18); Baxter Koziol (A '17) and Molly Springfield (A '06); Pallavi Singh (A '15) and Jing (Ellen) Xu (A '16); Hetty Baiz (A '69) and Jordan Seaberry (A '15).
Each pairing is curated by one or two members of the Alumni Alliance: Jesus Benavente (A '12), Annette Cyr (A '76, '21) and Rebecca Shippee (A '18), Michael Scoggins (A '03), Danny Greenberg (A '18) and Eleanor Kipping (A '18), and Paige Laino (Alumni & Archives Coordinator). Additional information about upcoming exhibitions in this series is forthcoming.
The Skowhegan Alumni Alliance is a group of alumni who generate off-campus programming for the international alumni community.