Artist in Residence
Kim Cridler Residency
The Paine is pleased to welcome Kim Cridler as an artist-in-residence with the Paine Art Center and Gardens throughout the summer and fall of 2006. Kim is a sculptor who teaches at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Formerly, she coordinated the renowned Arts/Industry residency program at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center in Sheboygan, Wisconsin.
The culmination of Kim’s residency will be the creation of a new permanent sculpture for the Paine’s gardens. In addition, she will participate in a wide spectrum of educational programs providing opportunities for the public to meet her, learn about her artwork, and watch her creative process unfold.
Kim’s residency complements the Paine’s summer exhibition Electric Tiffany by helping audiences to understand the craftsmanship and artistry of the Tiffany lamps. Rather than trying to reproduce the lamps and emulate the methods used to create them, Kim’s residency will engage audiences with a living artist whose artworks and methods have similarities to the lamps.
Kim Cridler is a metalworker, and her sculpture will be made from bronze. While people most likely think of stained-glass when they think of Tiffany lamps, the lamps also have exquisite metalwork in bronze. Kim’s residency will draw attention to this facet of the lamps. Her new sculpture will also have porcelain flowers that are inspired by the lily lampshades in the exhibition.
Kim’s welding process requires that she work from her own studio. Consequently, her residency is being documented online through the Paine’s website. Kim is providing commentary and images at regular intervals throughout the project. Visit often as Kim’s creative process unfolds here. Kim Cridler’s residency is generously sponsored by US Bank.
Biography of Kim Cridler
Trained as a metalsmith, Kim creates works that utilize the history, making, and meaning of craft and domestic ornamentation. She currently teaches as Assistant Professor in the Department of Art at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. An undergraduate at the University of Michigan, Kim earned an MFA in Metals from the State University of New York at New Paltz, and studied at Skowhegan School of Sculpture and Painting. Kim has taught in art programs across the country including University of Michigan, San Diego State University, Arizona State University, and Penland School of Crafts.
Awards include Visual Arts Fellowships from the Wisconsin Arts Board and the Arizona Commission on the Arts. Her work is featured in collections of the Arizona State University Art Museum, the Arkansas Art Center Decorative Museum of Art, the California State University Long Beach Art Museum, the John Michael Kohler Art Center, the Phoenix Office of Arts and Culture, the Scottsdale Contemporary Museum of Art, the Samuel Dorsky Museum at SUNY New Paltz.
Artist’s Statement
Growing up in rural Michigan, I learned my family history not through photographs, but through objects, both utilitarian and decorative. Deeply influenced by the power of things, and the memory of physical use that both destroys and completes them, I make striped down interpretations of domestic objects that become free to speak of the emotional, cultural, and historical climates in which these objects participate.
In my work, the grid-like forms represent an intellectual understanding. Like a definition, they are stable and enduring, but also cool and without lived experience. The materials I introduce, the patterns and ornamentation I render, complete these structures with the kind of emotional and sensual meaning that knowledge and language cannot adequately account for. In these materials, I want the viewer to recognize the modest, imperfect but insistent presence of the hand.
Continue to Sculpture Commission