Audience
Collaborative Artist Talk: Katie DeGroot and Kylie Heidenheimer
Tues. March 19, 2024, 4:45-5:45pm, Glendening Annex
Two visiting artists discuss their creative work and influences.
KATIE DeGROOT was born in Kandahar, Afghanistan and attended New York University earning a B.A. and Illinois State University. She says about her work, “When we think of a tree we usually conjure up an image of a perfectly pruned tree, balanced and symmetrical. In nature those rarely exist. Trees are individuals. Trees grow to survive, adapting to their given environment, growing into strange shapes, producing oddly shaped limbs, becoming contortionists to get to sunlight, and bowing to the will of other larger neighboring trees. They grow in context to each other and their neighbors, adapting as best they can to the situation they find themselves in. In many ways they are similar to us, part of a larger community, whose varied geography and specific environments challenge and form us as individuals.”
Katie DeGroot first began painting fallen branches and limbs found on the ground, responding to their interesting shapes and the wonderful natural decoration that adorned them. Soon she was collecting branches and even large trunks, festooned by lichens, moss and mushrooms and bringing them back to her studio. At first working with only individual branches, (Katie considers them her “muses”) she created singular portraits. Soon Katie started arranging the muses to interact between themselves, responding to something specific in the gesture or attitude of the actual real object. While she uses the branches as an observational starting point, Katie responds within the language of contemporary painting, not trying to realistically represent branches as natural objects. While DeGroot uses watercolors, she is not a “watercolorist,” she is a painter. Working with watercolors has also led Katie to exploring the watercolor mono-print process. Some of the artists that Katie admires and who inform her as an artist are Gladys Niilson, Alice Neel, Morandi, Matisse, Charles Burchfield, Catherine Murphy, Barbara Takenaga, and Arlene Shechet just to name a few. For more information on the artist: https://katiedegroot.com
KYLIE HEIDENHEIMER makes abstract paintings and watercolor monoprints that wrest and twist space. She was born in Gainesville, FL, grew up in St. Louis and moved to New York City where she went to Hunter College and earned her MFA. She has a BFA from Washington University in St. Louis. She has a studio on The Lower East Side in NY and also works in Upstate New York. Her work has been in solo shows at J.C. Flowers & Co, Thomas Jaeckel Gallery and The Italian Academy at Columbia University in New York City as well as at Galerie Gris in Hudson, NY and Ohio Northern University in Ada, OH.
Heidenheimer won a Mercedes Matter New York Studio School Alumni Award in 2021 and a Jason McCoy Gallery Drawing Challenge in 2020. She was a Janet Sloane Resident at Yaddo in 2020 and also attended Yaddo in 2016 as well as prior residencies at Blue Mountain Center, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, The Anderson Center of Disciplinary Studies, and The Millay Colony. Heidenheimer has shown in group exhibitions in New York City at Waterhouse & Dodd Gallery, O’Flaherty’s, 56 Henry Gallery, Thomas Jaeckel Gallery, Station Independent, The Hewitt Gallery at Marymount Manhattan College, Equity Gallery, Feature, Inc. and Storefront Bushwick. She has exhibited regionally and nationally in group shows at Private Public Gallery in Hudson, NY, Furnace Art on Paper Archive in Falls Village, CT, Joyce Goldstein Gallery in Chatham, NY, Indiana University’s J. Irwin Miller School of Architecture in Columbus, IN, The Hyde Collection in Glens Falls, NY, UT Knoxville’s Downtown Gallery and The Kleinert James Center, Woodstock. For more information on the artist: https://www.kylieheidenheimer.com