Curatorial Projects
Threads, Folds & Rabbit Holes
Threads, Folds & Rabbit Holes is an interdisciplinary traveling exhibition with extensive curatorial resources. The art and accompanying books cross the areas of art history/criticism, philosophy, literature, science, and technology. The exhibition features Holidays Unfolding, a series that investigates the historic use of decorative drapery and the artistic category of still life. The artwork examines the contradictory feelings that accompany loss or nostalgia and, as a result, become meditations on life’s transience. The series’ surreal imagery also comments on pressing issues in contemporary politics, culture and mores associated with American holidays. It explores new possibilities between a complex interface of painting, textiles, and digital technology, while producing a product that maintains the richness of slow work by hand.
Through the Veil series is also featured. Each painting begins with a rendering from a closely observed fabric with wrinkles and folds. They recapitulate the compositional structure of a painting/drawing by artists from the past and present or my Photoshop collage. The fabric in these paintings acts as a threshold that places the shape-shifting Rabbit into multiple, often conflicting, layers of space and meaning. The paintings good-humoredly deconstruct imagery from pop, outsider, and high culture to create new “spaces” of meaning. The paintings use dark humor, visual puns, symbols and metaphors, moments of silence, art historical allusions, cultural collisions, and spiritual conundrums to play with style and pictorial/formal construction.
Lectures, workshops, or other educational activities are available upon request. Edward Risden (pen name Edward S. Louis www.edwardslouis.com) created stories in response to the paintings in the exhibition. The resulting collaboration are two published books: The Singular Adventures of Rabbit and Kitty Boy and Holidays Unfolding: The Continuing Adventures of Rabbit and Kitty. Kristy Deetz and Edward Risden are life and creative partners and often present on their books and collaborative process. They recently presented to the MA Art students at Guizhou Normal University, China.
Contact Kristy Deetz for a full prospectus.
Threads, Folds & Rabbit Holes is posted on the Association of Academic Museums and Galleries website.
Threads, Folds & Rabbit Holes venues currently scheduled include:
Schmidt Center Gallery, Florida Atlantic University Museum, Boca Raton, FL (July 1 –Sept. 23, 2023)
Giertz Gallery, Parkland Community College, Champaign, IL (Oct. 9–Nov. 11, 2023)
Saluki Gallery, Sharp Museum, Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, IL (January 16–March 8, 2024)
Bradbury Art Museum, Arkansas State University, Jonesboro, AR (June 27–August 28, 2024)
McLanahan Gallery, Penn State Altoona Gallery, Altoona, PA (October 31, 2024–December 14, 2024)
Piedmont Arts, Martinsville, VA (March 29–May 11, 2025)
Caestecker Gallery, Ripon College, WI (September 5–October 3, 2025)
Gately Gallery, Francis Marion University, Florence, SC (January 13–March 5, 2026)
Danville Museum of Art & History, Danville, VA (mid-March–TBD)
Phillips Museum, Franklin & Marshall University, Lancaster, PA (January 19th–April 22nd, 2027)
Threads, Folds & Rabbit Holes installation, Schmidt Center Gallery, Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton, FL, July 1– Sept. 23, 2023
Rabbit Weaving: Complex Threads of Making
Rabbit Weaving: Complex Threads of Making is an interdisciplinary traveling exhibition featuring industrial jacquard weavings based on paintings from Kristy Deetz’ Through the Veil and Holidays Unfolding series. Through the process of this work, making sketches in Photoshop and creating patterns printed on silk that became sub-straights for paintings, the artist became interested in ways that digital technology translates images and gives multiple options for output and adding new meaning. The complex threads of the industrial jacquard weavings add another visual and conceptual layer to process and product. Translating images, slowly painted by hand, into a potentially mass-produced product that simulates slow work wrought by hand is amusing, mesmerizing, troubling, and a symptom of our times. As artists we engage in a reciprocal fabric of making. We tie and re-tie “strings” that simultaneously pull on the past, present, and future, on the artist and the viewer.
Lectures, workshops, or other educational activities are available upon request. Edward Risden (pen name Edward S. Louis www.edwardslouis.com) created stories in response to the paintings in the exhibition. The resulting collaboration are two published books: The Singular Adventures of Rabbit and Kitty Boy and Holidays Unfolding: The Continuing Adventures of Rabbit and Kitty. Kristy Deetz and Edward Risden are life and creative partners and often present on their books and collaborative process. They recently presented to the MA Art students at Guizhou Normal University, China.
Contact Kristy Deetz for a full prospectus.
Rabbit Weaving: Complex Threads of Making (current itinerary)
Craddock -Terry Gallery, Riverviews Artspace, Lynchburg, VA (July 7–August 17, 2023).
Foote Gallery, Loveland Museum, Loveland, CO (February 17–April 21, 2024).
Taube Museum of Art, Langer Gallery, Minot, ND (July 24–August 30, 2024).
Coconino Center for the Arts, Main Gallery, Flagstaff, AZ (Oct. 19–Dec. 21, 2024).
Jean B. King Gallery of Art, Herrett Center, College of Southern Idaho, Twin Falls, ID (January–March 2026)
FABRICation
FABRICation features the work of 7 artists (Erin Castellan, Kristy Deetz, Virginia Derryberry, Reni Gower, Rachel Hayes, Susan Iverson, and Natalie Smith) that incorporate a textile sensibility through elements of fabric and fabrication. Inspired by a rich array of historical textiles (drapery to quilt), these complex multi-part constructions are encoded by traditional handicraft to contrast our culture’s rampant media consumption with the redemptive nuance of slow work wrought by hand. Saturated with vibrant color, the luminous materiality activates the senses and counters passive visual skimming. Works range from delicate illusions to layered constructions to architectural interventions. Mixed media includes oil and acrylic paint, vintage clothing, aluminum screens, wool, silk, plastic, thread, vinyl, burlap, rug-hold, glass, recycled objects, and found fabrics. Whether painting, tapestry or construct, these works interweave sensory pleasure with repetitive process to invoke introspection and reflection.
Co-Curated by Kristy Deetz, Professor of Art (University of Wisconsin–Green Bay) and Reni Gower, Professor of Painting (Virginia Commonwealth University). Catalogue essay by Jessica Hemmings, Professor and Head of the Faculty of Visual Culture (National College of Art & Design, Dublin).
FABRICation Venues
2013 – (Tag) Theatre Arts Galleries, High Point, NC
2014 – University of North Carolina Pembroke, A.D. Gallery, Pembroke, NC
2015 – Connecticut College, Cummings Art Galleries, New London, CT
2015 – Purdue University Galleries, West Lafayette, IN
2015 – Morehead State University, Claypool-Young Art Gallery, Morehead, KY
2016 – Herron School of Art and Design, IUPUI, Herron Galleries, Indianapolis, IN
2016 – McCormick Gallery, Midland College, Midland, TX
2016 – New Mexico University Art Museum, Albuquerque, NM
2016 – Crossman Gallery, University of WI-Whitewater, Whitewater, WI
2016 – Sheppard Contemporary Gallery, University of NV-Reno, Reno, NV
2017 – Art Museum of West Virginia University, Morgantown, WV
2017 – Academy Art Museum, Easton, MD
2017 – Fine Arts Center, Bowling Green State University, Bowling Green, OH
2018 – Avenir Museum of Decorative Arts, Colorado State University, Fort Collins, CO