Making Is Thinking: An Exhibition of Artist Educators from Columbia University Teachers College

Exhibition Dates: September 6 - October 1, 2022

Opening Reception: Thursday, September 8, 5pM - 8pm

Drawing workshop for art educators: Saturday, September 17, 2PM - 4PM

Closing Symposium Making Is Thinking: Saturday, October 1, 3PM - 5PM

The Painting Center is pleased to present Making is Thinking: An Exhibition of Artist Educators from Columbia University Teachers College on view from September 6 to October 1, 2023. This exhibition, curated by Olga Hubard and Andrea Kantrowitz, features work by Kigin Yang, Savannah Nielson, Evelyn Olvera and Carolina Rojas.

What ways of thinking does art-making reveal and release? Art-making can give form to thoughts and feelings that cannot readily be put into words. Thinking through materials and with our hands and bodies, we observe, discover and invent, cultivating knowledge and understandings otherwise out of reach. This exhibition explores the ways of thinking that art practice makes possible.

Kigin Yang’s drawing installations are carried out in an improvisational manner that foregrounds chance and variability. As one drawn object is assimilated into another, the drawing as a whole grows and changes to reveal or extend new meanings: the process of drawing becomes a continual path of discovery.

Using traditional and contemporary textile-making in combination with photography, Savannah Nielson’s work visually represents the concept of memory fading. Bits and pieces of the image are dropped through the negative spaces of the woven substrate, referencing the loss of information as time passes.

A multi-media artist based in Los Angeles, Evelyn Olvera uses augmented reality and other traditional and digital media to respond to the housing crisis, gentrification, and the climate crisis. Her work reflects the changes she has experienced in her unique community, attempting to make sense of the generational poverty many low-income families are unable to escape, and how it could be otherwise.

Carolina Rojas creates visual installations that resemble natural history collections and cabinets of curiosities and situates them within contemporary cultural contexts. She reimagines traditional scientific illustration to reveal the character of a practice that consists of collecting animals and sacrificing them for display, provoking viewers to reflect on how we relate to nonhuman animals.

Catalogue: Unbound & Making is Thinking.pdf