November 17, 2023 - January 26, 2024
Finding Ground introduces the close observations of six artists – Julie Farstad, Cathleen Faubert, Philip Heying, Mitch Iburg, Cyan Meeks, and Erin Wiersma – who work directly in and with the land to discover the living, shifting ecologies of the diverse and chosen landscapes that engage them.
These rich meditations on place, shaped by the ongoing research of artists whose practices are inspired and informed by a deep connection to the natural world, reflect an expanded ecological consciousness and reveal some of the unique characteristics of their respective ecoregions, including the tallgrass prairie and Flint Hills of the Central Great Plains, the Outer Bluegrass Region of Kentucky, and the Minnesota River Valley.
Traces of labor, collaboration, and the body’s direct engagement with the land are evidenced in photography, video, drawing, installation, sculpture, scent, and sound. Throughout the exhibition, artistic production is dynamically recorded through acts of walking, mark-making, foraging, mapping, and documenting. Through material, sensorial, and pictorial approaches to making, these artists create dynamic portraits of the landscape that bear witness to the transitions of time, light, seasons, lifecycles, weather, and climate change, as well as the land practices used to understand, maintain, and restore the balance of these complex and varied ecosystems.
Informed by the varied ways in which these artists are consciously engaged with the land, Finding Ground invites a more expansive consideration of how we might think about and reimagine the American landscape of today.
Finding Ground is organized by Raechell Smith, Director & Curator, H&R Block Artspace.
photo by Ryan Waggoner © Spencer Museum of Art
Reading the World explores artistic investigations into forces of nature. Together the works displayed prompt viewers to consider their own encounters with the natural world, their ecological and political contexts, and how they become reflected in a wide range of mediums. All of these artworks come from larger bodies of work that demonstrate the artists’ ongoing inquiries into how we understand the world around us.
This exhibition is inspired by a partnership between the Spencer Museum’s Arts Research Integration program and Huixuan Wu, associate professor of aerospace engineering in KU’s School of Engineering. Like the work of the artists in the exhibition, Wu's research addresses natural phenomena that can be difficult to interpret. Reading the World is supported by his Career Award from the National Science Foundation.
Artist discussion with Grossman, Erin Wiersma, Lilly McElroy, and Marie McInerney on December 7, 5:30 – 6:30 pm.
LARRY & BARBARA MARSHALL FAMILY BALCONY, 404
Spencer Museum of Art
1301 Mississippi St.
Lawrence, KS 66045
Fenna Wehlau is showing current works by Paul Diestel (*1996) and Ruper Eder (*1968) in her gallery in the exhibition "Paul Diestel, Skulpturen & Rupert Eder, Painting" and in her showroom 21 "Erin Wiersma, Konza Works on Paper" from May 26 to July 28, 2023.
The exhibitions are part of the "Flower Power Festival" in Munich and the Kunstarealfest from July 13 to 16, 2023.
photo: Tony Favarula
25th February until 22th April 2022
This exhibition is a project of NEUSTART KULTUR, Stifung Kunstfonds. An accompanying catalogue is published.
Dragging through the Fire: On Erin Wiersma’s Konza Prairie
By: Colin Edgington
Fire is primordial and eternal. It attracts us and burns us like moths but heats us and gives us life. The core of our planet burns, and the center of our solar system does, too. As the planet heats up, fires become more prominent and more dangerous, reminding us of our beholden existence to Gaia. Their remnants of ash and char point to something volcanic and ancient.
September 11- November 10, 2019
Wiersma’s artistic practice focuses on the body’s capacity to absorb and respond to an environment. The Konza Prairie works on paper are created on location in one of the few remaining protected grasslands in the world. She creates a record of the land, using both bio-char produced from controlled burns and the embossing from the forbs, fauna and rocky terrain as they incise and transforms the paper surface echoing the topography. Pulling, rubbing, dragging, pushing, and lifting -- changed by the elements; wind, temperature, humidity, and landscape itself. She creates with the prairie; it influences her actions into large-scale works, resulting from the varying burn treatments, fire intensities, and vegetative composition from each locale.
featuring Grassland Interview (voices)
The exhibition includes interviews with scientists working in tallgrass prairies, collected by landscape architect Katie Kingery-Page who uses ethnographic interview methods to understand place. Grassland Interview, a series of scientists’ voices, can be heard in the galleries under sound domes. This on-going audio project gathers ecologists’ and land managers’ reflections on two critical aspects of the Konza grassland life-cycle: controlled burns and dormancy of grasses and forbs (wildflowers).
Programming
Friday, Sept. 13, 5-7pm / gallery talk at 6pm | Opening reception
Wednesday, Sept. 18, 12-1pm | Lunch & Learn with Erin Wiersma & Patrick O’Neal |
Sunday, Nov. 10, 2-4pm | Second Sunday with Erin Wiersma & Katie Kingery-Page
April 25-28, 2019
Galerie Fenna Wehlau Munich, DE
Rupert Eder, ghosting
Erin Wiersma, large-format drawings by Konza Prairie
Opening reception 25 april 17 - 20 o'clock
26 - 28 april 11am - 6pm
Please contact us by email at info@galerie-wehlau.de
Thursday, February 7, 2019 at 7 PM – 9 PM UTC+01
Die Arbeiten auf Papier der amerikanischen Künstlerin Erin Wiersma entstehen bei Performances im Umfeld von gezielten Abbränden in der Konza-Prärie, Kansas. Ein aktueller Film mit Drohnenaufnahmen zeigt den außergewöhnlichen Entstehungsprozeß der großformatigen Papierarbeiten von Erin Wiersma. Wiederholte Filmaufführung, Künstlergespräch. Eintritt frei, mit der Bitte um Voranmeldung.
AFTER THE BURN
Filming by Evert Nelson
Edited by Katie Kingery-Page & Erin Wiersma
(Kansas City, MO) Mid-America Arts Alliance (M-AAA) is pleased to present Wester: Works on Paper from the Konza Prairie by artist Erin Wiersma of Manhattan, Kansas, for First Friday February 1 and March 1 from 6:00– 8:00 p.m. at 2018 Baltimore in Kansas City’s Crossroads Arts District.
(Kansas City, MO) Mid-America Arts Alliance (M-AAA) is pleased to present Wester: Works on Paper from the Konza Prairie by artist Erin Wiersma of Manhattan, Kansas, for First Friday February 1 and March 1 from 6:00– 8:00 p.m. at 2018 Baltimore in Kansas City’s Crossroads Arts District. https://www.maaa.org/
National Science Foundation: LTER NETWORK
AFTER THE BURN: Making Art out of Grassland Fires
Jennifer Rhodes, Published April 3, 2018
Two Coats of Paint Residency: December 11 - 17, 2017
Open Studio: Thursday, December 14, 6 – 9pm
Address: 55 Washington Street, #321, Brooklyn NY (DUMBO)
Delighted to be showing at Robischon.
Erin Wiersma : Works from the "Examen" series
Oct 5 – Nov 4, 2017
Erin Wiersma
www.robischongallery.com
Each painting from Kansas artist Erin Wiersma’s “Examen” series is a densely layered composition of overlapping linear marks of hand-mixed pigments and polymer binders. More than its overt layers of painted or drawn lines of minimal palettes, each stratified painting based on a specific date, began as a daily practice; an act of mindfulness as a meditative ritual bordering on performance. Currently the dates are intended to point to a start time, generally placing the works on a timeline which may accurately correlate to the genesis of that painting or instead include dates of events that are important (in ways either small or significant) from both private or collective moments that are embodied in memory. It is this pursuit of the authentic and conscious mark which the artist feels parallels a kind of universal quest. Wiersma states,” In my drawings, I seek to discover a confluence of the spiritual and material. My works are created through a meditative process of tracing, eliminating, finding and forging drawn lines on the surface of the paper. These accumulated marks become intertwined layers and untraceable histories of past, present and future.” As a temporal consideration, the artist’s single-minded deliberations define time for her as it brings deep space into form through each expressive gesture. At once equally contemplative and dynamic, vibrant translucency and opacity become metaphors for experience; contained, yet expansive within the ongoing continuum of Wiersma’s work.
100 Works on Paper Benefit
May 20, 2017
353 Van Brunt Street, (Red Hook)
Brooklyn, NY
The Jewish Art Salon presents Natural Instincts, an exhibition hosted by the Charter Oak Cultural Center in Hartford, CT.
October 26 – November 18, 2017, Monday-Friday 9:30-5:30
Opening Reception: Thursday, October 26th, 6-8 PM.
Charter Oak Cultural Center, Hartford, CT.
21 Charter Oak Avenue, Hartford, CT 06106
This exhibition will bring together works that embody harmonious multiculturalism and inter- religious unity. In the current age, we focus on what divides, rather than what unites us. Artists are showing works that highlight our common humanity, rather than our differences.
June 2015
October 30 - November 29, 2014
Opening Reception: Thursday, November 6, 6-9pm
A.I.R. Gallery is pleased to announce, The Theory of Line, Erin Wiersma’s solo exhibition of drawings created throughout 2014. The exhibition will be on view from October 30th through November 29th, with an opening reception on November 6th from 6-9pm.
Wiersma’s non-representational drawings are createdthrough a meditative process that seeks confluencebetween the spiritual and material worlds. This meditation emerges, according to artist/writer Sharon Butler, as a natural response to our perception of time as moving at an impossibly rapid pace thanks to the rapidly accelerating rates of IT innovation. Through her drawing practice, Wiersma gets a handle on the reins, slowing time down, “Elegantly capturing time as line.” “In a roiling world that obscures and devours units of time”, Butler continues, “pausing to remember and articulateeven small moments matters all the more.”
Artist/curator Marsha Levin-Rojer observes that “Wiersma’s creative process is an intense one and it pays o . The works speak well together. When viewed as a whole, there appears, throughout, an underlying web-like framework reminiscent of Virginia Woolf’s ‘moments of being’ -- a glimpse of a greaterwhole, a larger pattern that is sometimes hidden behind ‘the opaque surface of daily life.’”
Wiersma drawings have been exhibited in the United States as well as internationally. She received her Master of Fine Arts in Painting from University of Connecticut, and a Bachelor of Arts degree from Messiah College. She is currently working in Manhattan, Kansas as an Assistant Professor at Kansas State University. This is Wiersma’s first solo exhibition at A.I.R. Gallery.
A.I.R. GALLERY | 111 Front Street, #228 | Brooklyn, NY 11201 | www.airgallery.org | (212) 255 6651 | Wed - Sun 12-6PM
Solo Exhibition at Johnson Hall Gallery
Jackson State University, Jackson, Mississippi
September 25 - December 5, 2014
Opening Reception: September 25, 2014, 4 p.m. to 6 p.m.
Artist Talk: September 25, 2014 at 2pm in the Dollye M.E. Robinson building Room 166/266
Awarded Best in Show, Limestone, 5/19/2014
National Juried ExhibitionJuried by Leah Ollman
Exhibition Dates: July 12 - 27, 2014
The "Draw, Drawing, Drawn" exhibition is a celebration of drawing and the continually evolving relationship between observation and invention. Primary, sophisticated, honest, revealing, and fundamental, drawing is a common language that people of all ages use to communicate. The Vita Art presents an exhibit showing a contemporary cross section of what is happening now in drawing.