KIM BECK: HERE

On view through December 19 / Northern Grove

Laumeier is excited to announce a new annual, artist-designed flag project for the 30-foot tall flagpole located in the Park’s Northern Grove, debuting with Here by Pittsburgh-based artist Kim Beck. Beck’s series of three flags will feature patterns and textures captured from Laumeier’s landscape through the process of rubbings. By literally and metaphorically elevating traces of the Park’s organic and built surfaces, Beck’s work will bring forward aspects of the Park’s landscape that are often ignored or overlooked.

To complete the project, Beck partnered with Laumeier’s Studio Practice Coordinator Sarah Harford, who worked onsite to create multiple nature rubbings of a range of surfaces in the Park using newsprint and lumber marking crayons. This technique captured the impressions that informed the imagery of Beck’s finished flags.

In her artistic practice, Beck aims to bring the ordinary, often overlooked topographies and structures that make up our built environment into focus. Here, 2021 elevates the status of something that is trod on, laid upon or leaned against to something that is looked up to or even revered.

Kim Beck, Here, 2021. Courtesy of the artist.

PUBLIC PROGRAMS

CONVERSATION SERIES (Virtual) / Artist talk with Kim Beck

Join Laumeier for an online conversation with Pittsburgh-based artist Kim Beck to learn more about her artistic practice and her flag project at Laumeier.

Thursday, October 7 / 6:30 p.m. CT / Via Zoom / FREE, but reservation required

ABOUT THE ARTIST

“With a background in printmaking and drawing, I make images and things through a process of iteration, sketching and reworking. I work with multiples and repetition and use representation to question ways land can be constructed, changed and understood. Drawings are meditations on the structures and surfaces in the landscape. A pothole in the road jolts the traveler into seeing the landscape anew; the process of drawing it is a meditation on erosion and change, and it turns what was a banal eyesore into something sublime.” - Kim Beck

Born in Colorado in 1971, Kim Beck received her MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design and BA from Brandeis University. Her work has been exhibited at the Walker Art Center, the Carnegie Museum of Art, Socrates Sculpture Park, High Line NYC, Memphis Brooks Museum of Art, Pittsburgh Center for the Arts and Hallwalls Contemporary Art Center. She has received Pollock-Krasner and Thomas J. Watson Fellowships, and awards from Ars Electronica, NYSCA, the Tennessee Arts Commission, and the Heinz Foundation. Her artist’s book, A Field Guide to Weeds, was published through the Printed Matter Emerging Artist Publishing Program. She has been awarded residencies at the Bemis Center, Marie Walsh Sharpe Space Program, Yaddo, International Studio & Curatorial Program, Cité Internationale des Arts Paris, Vermont Studio Center, VCCA, The College of Fine Arts Sidney and Artists Image Resource with the support of the Heinz Creative Heights grant. Beck is an Associate Professor in the School of Art at Carnegie Mellon University. Click here to learn more.

Laumeier Sculpture Park’s ongoing operations and programs are generously supported by St. Louis County Parks; Regional Arts Commission; Missouri Arts Council; Arts and Education Council; among other corporations, foundations, individual donors and members. 

Additional funding related to  COVID-19 relief has been provided by the National Endowment for the Arts, the Windgate Foundation, the U.S. Small Business Administration, and the St. Louis County Small Business Relief Program.

2020-21 exhibitions are supported by Ellen and Durb Curlee, Alison and John Ferring, Jan and Ronnie Greenberg, Nancy and Ken Kranzberg, Joan and Mitchell Markow and Two Sister’s Foundation, Emily Rauh Pulitzer, Mary Ann and Andy Srenco.