Kat Wiese
Kat Wiese
Katharen Wiese (b. 1995) is an multidisciplinary artist from Lincoln, NE, currently residing in New Haven, Connecticut. She holds a B.F.A. in Studio Art from the University of Nebraska at Lincoln (2018) and is an MFA candidate at Yale University (2024). Her work has been featured in exhibitions across the Midwest including the Charlotte Street Foundation (2020), Museum of Nebraska Art (2021), Kiechel Fine Art (2022), Lux Center for the Arts (2020, 2022), Tugboat Gallery (2019) the Prairie Arts Center (2017) and many more. Wiese was awarded the Nebraska Artist Fellowship and the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Grant in 2022. Wiese’s work can be found in numerous public and private collections including the Thomas P. Coleman print collection at the Sheldon Museum of Art. Wiese views building an art historical cannon which decentralizes patriarchy and white supremacy among her central work as an artist and community member. Wiese's work analyzes the relationship between identity formation, power and race. Her most recent work explores both multiracialness and intersectional identities among Black Nebraskans through podcasting and portraiture.
"In Relief" 2022 Solo Exhibition Statement:
Charles Wadell Chesnutt was an early African American author who spent half of his career passing as White but his concern was always with Black issues and multiracial experiences. I began to reckon with Chesnutt’s racial fluidity in contrast to his legacy: in his death he is always a Black author but in his life he was received differently. Charles Chesnutt is among a number of subjects I explored in relief printmaking between 2020 and 2021 using color rhetorically to describe both multiracial experience, gender and the term “high yellow,” historically used to describe Black people with light skin. In relief utilizes black and white prints paired with different multimedia processes like painting, collage and paper marbling to reflect the activity of identity construction as a multilayered nonlinear experience.
I want to thank the University of Nebraska Lincoln and the New School for Design for introducing me to the work of Charles Chesnutt through our collaboration on the Charles Chesnutt Archive. Discover Chesnutt’s work and see the art I created for the site at https://chesnuttarchive.org/.
