Calder Kamin

For the past 2 years, Calder Kamin has acted as the Gallery Coordinator of Red Star Studios. In June, 2011 she accepted a position with the career services office at the Kansas City Art Institute. She is responsible for the professional practice lecture series and professional development workshops. Calder spends much of her time online to promote her work and ideas. She contributes to Red Star Studios Gallery blog and is the official voice for Charlotte Street Foundations' residency blog. She also created a blog of alumni advice for KCAI students and will conduct a workshop this fall on professional visibility through building an online presence for them. Calder also lives with her boyfriend, artist Kurt Flecksing in the Columbus Park neighborhood of Kansas City.

Prior to her current experience, Calder spent two years at the School of Visual Arts in New York City on a Rhodes scholarship. She also received a BFA in ceramics and art history from the Kansas City Art Institute in 2009.

While at KCAI, in addition to the Rhodes scholarship, Calder was awarded several competitive grant proposals and scholarships, including a competitive scholarship to KCAI (half tuition) Ken Ferguson Award, Magic Sock Fund, and a McKeown Special Project Grant. She also appeared on the PBS series Craft in America episode "Process" trailer and webisodes, featuring other KCAI students and ceramics professor Cary Esser.

Since her BFA, she has shown nationally at the Craft in America Study Center and New Puppy Gallery in LA, Ann Street Gallery in Newburgh, New York, NCECA in Tampa, Florida. She will also show in Austin, Texas in 2012.

Growing up in Austin, Texas, she was always an artist, encouraged to make art and pursue it as a career. At age eleven, she began selling her work in galleries in the up and coming South Congress neighborhood. She comes from a family of artists; her mother and grandfather have had successful careers in commercial art. Her grandfather was Creative Director for an international advertising agency in Houston. Now retired, he also paints and whenever she goes home to visit, they tour the city's great art museums.

Since her two person exhibition in June, 2011 with Julie Malen at the Kansas City Artists Coalition, Calder has have sent dozens of emails to galleries in an effort to promote her work nationally. She also uses the internet as a public space to make work. She continues to send applications for exhibition proposals, residencies, and public art projects. Calder was recently awarded a Charlotte Street Foundation Urban Culture Project Studio in Kansas City's downtown. So setting up a space, making new work, and volunteering for Charlotte Street keeps her busy. Next to needing that environment, the other thing she (and all artists likely) needs is time in that space.

Calder's artistic focus is envisioning information.

She's become more familiar with Adobe Illustrator as a drawing tool. For a series called Animal Graphs, she renders data about exotic animal populations using their form and prints, loving the flatness of the graphic print in a computer image.

Her work is about story telling. Specifically the complex relationship between humans and animals; the ones we love, the ones we hate and the ones we eat.

Depending on the viewers' relationship to environment, her work has been called 'cute, beautiful, repulsive, weird and uncanny.' but always to motivate conversation about their association with nature. In return, the audience will share stories and images of animals with her. She often gets, "Oh Calder I saw this bird I can't recognize," or "There was a dead skunk, and thought of you." We are exchanging experiences about the natural world in a very human way, says Kamin.

Calling her subject "new nature," 21st century human perception collides with the natural world. Her message is political, ecologically conscious and anthropological. Ecology is a global and political concern to Calder who feels that her most political works are the recent animal graphs series: comparisons of endangered species populations to those in captivity. Her concern is if human expansion won't make room for large wildlife (also called charismatic mega fauna, large and loveable), she asks, why are we breeding them in captivity, only to cause what Temple Grandin (professor and animal behavior expert) would say for the animal and it's offspring " a lesser quality of life" in most cases.

As she is always observing animals, part of her source material is to keep a catalog of experiences for her Animal Log. From an early age she was interested in nature and grew up enjoying her grandfather's National Geographics. She has always made animals in clay (polymer before porcelain), but her recent work on animals emerged after seeing guest lecturer Grandin at the Art Institute. This awakened her love for fact finding. Research is an enormous part of her studio practice, and loves the public library for her nonfiction needs.

Calder has come to understand the organic opportunities that have arisen in a place like Kansas City. Although smaller than her native Austin, Texas or New York City, the Kansas City area is boasting a strong retention of artists choosing to make this area their home to live and make work. Because of its organic, grassroots funding and inclusive artists community, she says, "It's like I found the magic secret to having a fulfilling, emerging art life in the Midwest."

As a working artist, Calder admits, it is her responsibility to make sales and cultivate collector relationships so she can survive and thrive as an artist.

Since arriving in Kansas City, she began to notice many opportunities for professional development that wasn't immediately available in larger cities. She was persistent on attaining competitive work-study positions, including collections manager for the Ceramic Department's Ken Ferguson Teaching Collection and gallery assistant at the H&R Block Artspace. It was at Artspace she realized her interest and strengths in art administration, and working with the public.

While all of her art careers are part-time, she is, however, planting seeds for fulltime employment or fulltime studio.

She continues to flex new art muscles fathoming interdisciplinary projects that are educational and experiential. She approached experts in animal ecology and biology for several proposals, such as, The Discovery Center for an event, or what she calls an Urban Safari. With a staff member, Calder will guide a group through the city looking for urban wildlife. One example is to observe nocturnal omnivores by scheduling the tour with a neighborhood's trash night. Nighttime is a returning theme in her work as a way to reveal hidden worlds.

Calder is a Spring 2010 Artist INC Fellow.

Visit Calder Kamin's website here.

Written by Blair Schulman, 2011.