Last year, during our 35th year anniversary, Atlantic Center for the Arts expanded its long-standing commitment to the area by launching a Community Artist-in-Residence (CAIR). Each year ACA will host two artists, whose residency will last for four months. The chosen artists will live and work out of ACA’s Harris House facility on Riverside Drive and will be charged with creating a project that directly involves and interacts with the community.
Atlantic Center for the Arts is now preparing for our second Community Artist-in-Residence, Katherine Ball. This exceptional artist experiments with alternatives to the dominant discourse. She has lived in an off-grid, floating island building mushroom filters to clean a polluted lake, bicycled across the US filming a documentary about communities' solutions to the climate crisis, and co-organized the "Free Market" a free, gleaned food market that fed people experiencing homelessness and living in transitional housing. Ball’s artistic practice is founded on a hands-on, solutions-oriented approach to ecological activism, social engagement, and pluriversal counter-hegemony. She makes things and makes things happen. She approaches art making as an experiment in generating new levels of understanding by bringing together multiple subject areas. By combining articulate visual aesthetics, ecological research/field work, and community engagement, new understanding can be generated about systemic causes and solutions to social and environmental issues. Guiding questions include: How can art be an agent of awareness and action? How can art amplify collective and diverse voices? How is art’s impact increased when it is informed by research and rooted in community?
Katherine was born in Detroit, Michigan and works in London, England. Venues for her public projects have included the Indianapolis Museum of Art, Smack Mellon (NYC), Portland Art Museum, Bétonsalon (Paris), Kampnagel (Hamburg), and Kunsthall Charlottenborg (Copenhagen). She has an MFA in Art and Social Practice from Portland State University.
Meet the Community Artist-in-Residence Katherine Ball
Saturday, February 2, 4 - 7 PM. Free and open to the public.
Atlantic Center for the Arts at Harris House.
