Alumni Artists in Exhibit Responding to Coronavirus

The South Bend Museum of Art’s first online exhibit, Making a Way, is the museum’s response to the nationwide coronavirus lockdowns which began in mid-March. The museum received 191 submissions and the SBMA’s Exhibitions Committee chose the resulting works. Among the fifty artists selected, two are Columbia alumni: Kamari Carter '19 and Saskia Krafft '19.

Making a Way is presented episodically; each week, from the exhibit’s opening on June 1, the museum’s website features a group of different artists whose works speak to a certain general theme. Carter’s work will be featured the week of July 6, as part of the show “Perspective: Existing work by artists now has added meaning,” while Krafft’s will feature the following week on July 13, as part of “Translation: Artists making new work directly related to the pandemic.”

Other themes of the exhibit include “Together,” “Adaption,” “Solace,” “Freedom,” and “Interruption.” The first four shows are available online.

The gallery’s press release reads, “As of the opening of Making A Way, we can’t see the forest because we’re still amongst the trees. We don’t know how the Coronavirus will change the way we live. Or what final toll it will claim. But that is the point of this exhibition. Not to give answers, but to become a record of the moment — while we are still inside the forest. There are innumerable unknowns, and it is a strange state of being where we, together with the artists of Making A Way, find ourselves. These are historic times and this exhibition will remain on SBMA’s website as a historical document created in the moment.”

Carter is a producer, performer, sound designer, and installation artist primarily working with sound and found objects. Carter's practice circumvents materiality and familiarity through a variety of recording and amplification techniques to investigate notions such as space, systems of identity, oppression, control, and surveillance. Carter’s work has been exhibited at such venues as Automata Arts, MoMA, Fridman Gallery, Lenfest Center for the Arts, and Issue Project Room, to name a few. Carter holds a BFA in Music Technology from California Institute of the Arts and is a recent graduate of the Sound Art MFA program at Columbia.

Krafft attended Columbia as a German Fulbright Scholar. She grew up near the world’s largest automobile manufacturing plant as the daughter of a theater dressmaker and a technical draftsman. Like this, she was introduced early on to the unique relationship between drawing, construction, fabrication, and the relationship of them to the body. Krafft is a recent graduate of the Visual Arts MFA program at Columbia.

Making A Way will close at the end of this year.