Katy Schimert

Katy Schimert BFA ’85 (Fine Arts/Sculpture) has been awarded a 2020 Guggenheim Fellowship. Working across a variety of media, including drawing and sculpture, Schimert uses fragments of personal experience as a conceptual impetus. The intersection of the fine and decorative arts is a formal point of departure for the artist. Densely layered and vaguely topographical, her drawings suggest sequences of cosmic or otherworldly events occasionally populated by ethereal human figures; as Schimert describes it, they create a “space for illusion.” The results of this investigation are not only visually compelling, but formally succinct—this allows Schimert’s works in various media to meld together as an ongoing visual essay.

Katy Schimert (b. 1963) is a recipient of the 2020 Joan Mitchell Center Artist-in-Residence, New Orleans. Her works have been included in significant solo and group shows since the early 1990s. Recent venues include the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Moody Center for the Arts, Houston; and the University Museum of Contemporary Art, U-Mass Amherst. Prominent public collections include The Hammer Museum, LA; Museum of Contemporary Art, LA; Museum of Modern Art, NY; and the RISD Museum of Art, Providence. Katy Schimert is an associate professor of Ceramics at Rhode Island School of Design. The artist lives and works in New York and Rhode Island.

Photo Credit: Zack Garlitos