Low Residency Creative Writing Alumni Fellow Joanna Kaufman exhibits in PNCA's Center for Contemporary Art & Culture
June 20, 2022
PNCA's inaugural Low Residency Creative Writing Alumni Fellow Joanna Kaufman exhibits in PNCA's Center for Contemporary Art & Culture. The show is titled WHEELS OF and will be up for the duration of the Low Residency Creative Writing Residency, June 22-July 2.
- PNCA hosts an opening reception on July 24, 6 pm PST.
- Kaufman reads with LRCW Faculty on Friday, June 24, 7 pm PST. Folks can attend via PNCA's Youtube or in-person, Room 413.
- Kaufman gives an artist talk on Sunday, June 26 at 10:15 am PST in CCAC.
A collaboration between family members Cheryl and Joanna Kaufman, WHEELS OF is a collection of forty-four paintings on aspects of relational embodiment.
Cheryl Kaufman, author and retired worker in criminal justice who lives in Kansas, began in August 2018 to contemplate visions of unique wheels. She shared these with Joanna, a PNCA MFA graduate, painter and writer, who rendered them in watercolor and mineral inks on paper. The four year collaboration was completed in May of 2022.
The paintings consider the convergence of infinite mathematical ideas with constraints of practical making. Similar to the way in which poetry holds paradox, they hold aspects of theory and form in tension with iterative creative embodiment. Works are displayed chronologically as Joanna painted them, from Wheel of Mystery to Wheel of Service. Since wheels with more intricate designs required larger sizes to encompass their detail, the exhibition is an act of growth, responding to these unfolding conditions of time and space.
Joanna Kaufman is an artist and writer who works with mediums of language, paint and music. She has worked as a teacher of second-language acquisition and art in the United States and abroad, and has collaborated on text-image projects including illustration of thirteen storybooks with independent writers. She received a MFA in creative writing from PNCA of Willamette, where she is currently the Low Residency Creative Writing Alumni Fellow. Her work is held within public collections including the City of Portland, Oregon, Regional Arts and Culture Council and the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma. A descendent of European immigrants and a member of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma, she lives in Trout Lake, Washington, at the base of an active stratovolcano and near the site of a village called Cranes’ Place in former days for sandhill cranes which nested in wetlands historically part of the Yakama and Cowlitz homelands.