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'''Kim Victoria Abeles '''

Kim Victoria Abeles (August 28, 1952) is an American artist who is best known for the Smog effect was born in Richmond Heights, Missouri. Her arts were mostly from her childhood and social-political elements engraved in them. She had hosted many exhibitions including some of her own solo ones. She is an artist, a professor, and is also a feminist. She received many awards. Her works consist of community-based projects that have elements of biography, geography as well as environment. In addition to that, her social-political works present subjects like feminism, HIV/AIDS, labor, domestic violence, etc. Many of her projects are biography, geography, and environment-based. For some, she also had the help of the California Science Center, air pollution control agencies, health clinics, mental health departments, and natural history museums in California, Colorado, and Florida. Abeles uses a research-based for her practice, where she would choose a subject to investigate thoroughly. The process would then continue with assembling the information, illustrations, or source materials in notebooks, and finally producing the artwork. This type of process is more "encyclopedic” therefore her work mostly is about a specific person or human struggle. With that, the title for the exhibition is Kim Abeles Encyclopedia Person.

Instagram: instagram.com/kimabeles

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/kimabeles

'''Life and Education '''

Abeles met a Buddhist priest, Kosai Kobari, who introduced her to traditional Japanese arts in 1969. She was an American Field Service student at that time. A few years after, she lived in a grain silo in Ohio, where she becomes an illustrator for the book Crafts, Cookery and Country Living, published by Van Nostrand Reinhold Co. She graduated from the University of California, Irvine with an M.F.A and is also currently a professor at California State University, Northridge. Kim Abeles organized many traveling exhibitions that portray the AIDS epidemic the Gulf War and activist art. One of her many outstanding works includes her HIV/AIDS Tarot cards in 1992 present issues of the socioeconomic and medical sides of HIV/AIDS. The cards are printed with texts on one side and pictures on the other side. Another project created called "Run-off Dolphin Suitcase" is through a commission from the Santa Monica Bay Restoration Project in 1994. She made a collaboration with ArtCommotion, a web magazine, to create and promote an interactive computer work Equidistant. Kim Abeles in the year 1997 finished her book titled "Environmental Activity Book" which is funded partially by the Los Angeles Cultural Affairs Department. The book includes her own environmentally-based installation projects for classrooms and families. She once lived in Los Angeles, where she would use to sit on a bench next to her sculpture of a manzanita seed that weighs 10000 pounds, from her series “Citizen Seeds”. The series was created for the local trail system through the Los Angeles County arts commissions and incorporates the work of community members. In 2013, Kim Abeles was handed the Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship, along with being a recipient of fellowships from J. Paul Getty Trust Fund for the Visual Arts, California Community Foundation, and Pollack-Krasner Foundation. She also created a line of sculptural suitcases for Camp Ground: Arts, Corrections, and Fire Management in the Santa Monica Mountains that bring along artists of the Los Angeles County Fire Department as a collaboration with the paid and inmate workforces. The project was funded by the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), Los Angeles County Arts Commission, and administered by The Armory Center for the Arts. Kim Abeles was also an artist-in-residence at the Institute of Forest Genetic in 2018, where her project called "Resilience" was funded by NEA and administered by the El Dorado Arts Council. Abeles held hundreds of exhibitions including large-scale ones not only in the United States but also in countries like Vietnam, Thailand, the Czech Republic, England, China, and South Korea. She also represented the U.S. for the Fotografie Biennale Rotterdam and Cultural Centre of Berchem in Antwerp.

Work

Kim Abeles opened a studio in downtown Los Angeles in the mid-1980s. The building was in between two buildings located in the San Gabriel Mountains. She had stayed in a grain silo in Ohio, then sets out to photograph the space of a fire escape from her studio, which takes a year and three weeks. In that same year, she also experimented with a new type of medium which made up some of her most significant works in 3 decades. Kim Abeles had cut an image of the mountain wedge from a vinyl sheet to cover a plexiglass plate, then set it on the fire escape for a month to get the matter. She create a "smog" effect from the image to create the pollution that she called “a stenographer of the skyline.” Since the year 1985, Kim Abeles's projects and works are mostly about the environment and the main highlight is air pollution. After the publication of The Smog Collector, she gained not only national attention but internationally known in the art field and through mainstream print and media. In addition, "Kim Abeles: Encyclopedia Persona, A Fifteen-Year Survey" curated by Karen Moss was initiated and sponsored by the Fellows of Contemporary Art in 1993. Many of Kim Abeles's works are displayed in exhibitions in the United States, with additional galleries and museums in Canada, Belgium, The Netherlands, Spain, and Czechoslovakia, and represented the United States in both Fotografie Biennale Rotterdam (1992) and Cultural Centre of Berchem, Antwerp (1993). Many of Abeles's works are displayed in public collections in locations like MOCA, LACMA, Berkeley Art Museum, California African American Museum, Brooklyn Museum, and National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency. Whereas some of her own journals, books, and documents are collected to be placed at the entrance for Art + Environment, Nevada Museum of Art. Kim Abeles created artwork in conjunction with a unique variety of collaborations such as the Bureau of Automotive Repair, Santa Monica Bay Restoration Project, California Science Center, natural history museums in California and Colorado, and the Lakota Indians of South Dakota. She also dealt with many projects with visual art with an open mind, mostly related to topics like the urban environment, feminism, aging, HIV/AIDS, labor, domestic violence, and collective memory. For one exhibition, Kim displayed twelve series of her work in 1979, that include the Kimonos and Shrines, inspired by the memories she had when she was still living in Japan; Fact/Fiction Boxes that question authoritative texts and authenticity; Biographical Portraits of significance politics people such as Ethel and Julius Rosenberg or Rosa Parks; Image of St. Bernadette, Pilgrimage to the Wedge, a performance and environmental work; Long Exposures, a portrait of a feminist artist, HIV/AIDS Projects, sculptures and Tarot, bilingual educational materials, Habeus Corpus, liberty and legality and the Smog Collectors, objects and installations with images etched from particulate matter, for which she has become internationally recognized.

Exhibitions and Work
 * Kim Abeles: Smog Collectors, 1987-2020, Curated by Jennifer Frias, Nicholas and Lee Begovich Gallery, California State University Fullerton; September 18 -December 18, 2021.
 * Spring 2023, the Smog Collector survey exhibition will travel to Sacramento State University's Library Gallery.
 * Her book, Kim Abeles: Smog Collectors, 1987-2020. The book is 140 pages in full color with a stunning design by James P. Scott.
 * Kim Abeles - A Survey, Curated by Michele Ellis Pracy, Fresno Art Museum, Fresno, CA; July 30, 2022, through January 8, 2023. The exhibit and catalog are made possible by the Council of 100 who selected Kim Abeles for the Distinguished Woman Artist Award.
 * In Nature Nothing Exists Alone, Co-curated by Chris Costan and Laziza Rakhimova, NYC Culture Club at the World Trade Center, New York (opens January 26 - March 7, 2022)
 * Stories of the Land, Curated by Suvan Geer and Sandra Mueller, Santa Ana College Art Gallery, CA (In 2021)
 * Mapping the Sublime, Co-curated by Beth Davila Waldman and Lawrence Gipe, Brand Library and Art Center, Glendale, CA (April 2 - June 11, 2022)
 * A Place for Justice, Organized by Professor Tina Yapelli and students of Art 506: Contemporary Issues, Virtual exhibition presented by University Art Gallery, San Diego State University (In 2021)
 * Cautious Optimism, Including Curtis Stage, Brian Thomas Jones, Hagop Najarian, Jamal Hasef, Kim Abeles, Molly Schulman, Cherie Brenner Davis, Jessica Goehring; Durden and Ray, Los Angeles (In 2021)
 * The Coming World: Ecology as the New Politics 2030–2100, Curated by Snejana Krasteva and Ekaterina Lazareva, Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow, Russia (In 2019)

Awards

Kim Abeles has received fellowships and awards from the J. Paul Getty Trust Fund for the Visual Arts, California Community Foundation, Durfee Foundation, Pollack-Krasner Foundation, Los Angeles Cultural Affairs Department, and California Arts Council.

References