February 4, 2022
Hickman visiting artist exhibition in Mark A. Chapman Gallery
"Silence" by Pat Hickman, with poems by Gail Hovey, is on display now through Feb. 16 in the Mark A. Chapman Gallery in Willard Hall on the Kansas State University Manhattan campus. Gallery hours are 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday.
"This timely exhibition of Hickman's work and ekphrastic poetry by Gail Hovey deals with the vulnerability of the human condition," said Geraldine Craig, professor of art and curator for the exhibition. "'Remembrance,' an installation of small membrane-like sculptures that hold the memory of discarded rusty farm implements, has an elegiac quality that references both the fragility of our bodies and a lost way of life. Hickman's 2021 solo installation 'Counting, Still Counting' at the Buster Levi Gallery in New York, seen here in video, wrapped the room with tally marks of rusty nails encased in gut, a mathematical visualization of grappling with the expansion and compression of time while the pandemic raged."
Hickman says on her website, "Labor is a big part of my work, the excessive, obsessive labor, the slowing down of time, stepping out of the urgent pace of daily life. Out of seemingly nothing, something is created. I invest in what I love doing. In the end, the work itself is about the labor and about holding what cannot be captured: light, color, breath, time."
Hickman is the recipient of two individual artist grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, and an elected fellow of the American Craft Council, to name a few among many distinctions. Her work has been shown in Australia, Finland, Italy and a tour across Africa, in solo exhibitions across the U.S., and has been collected by numerous institutions including the Renwick Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Philadelphia Museum of Art; and the Denver Art Museum, among others. She is an artist and educator known for creating sculptural installations using natural materials, including gut and sinew. Hickman taught for 29 years at schools around Northern California before teaching 16 years at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, Honolulu, where she is professor emerita of art. After retirement, she relocated to the Hudson River Valley in New York, where she maintains her studio.