Katy Schimert

Katy Schimert (born 1963) is an American artist known for exhibitions and installations that meld disparate media into cohesive formal and conceptual visual statements arising out of personal experience, myth and empirical knowledge. She interweaves elements of fine and decorative arts, figuration and abstraction in densely layered drawings and sculpture that together suggest elliptical narratives or unfolding, cosmic events. Curator Heidi Zuckerman wrote that Schimert is inspired by "the places where the organized and the chaotic intersect—the scientific and the mythic, the known and the unknown, and the real and the imagined … she creates work that exists where, through fantasy, truth and beauty meet."

Katy Schimert, Lurking Octopus, watercolor on paper, 51" x 99.5", 2014.

Schimert received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2020, as well as awards from the Joan Mitchell Foundation and Pollock-Krasner Foundation, among others. Her work belongs to the public collections of institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MOCA), and Walker Art Center. She lives and works in New York City and Rhode Island, and teaches at Rhode Island School of Design.

Early life and career Schimert was born in 1963 in Grand Island, New York, a town northwest of Buffalo overlooking Lake Erie. She studied sculpture at Philadelphia College of Art (BA, 1985), while also developing interests in performance and writing. After graduating, she moved to New York City, where she worked as a studio assistant to artist Allan McCollum and joined the performance company, Bricolage, as a costume/set designer and performer in reworkings of Les Liaisons dangereuses and Dracula. After enrolling at Yale University (MFA, 1989) to study sculpture, she continued to make forays into other media, including photography and drawing.

Since then, she has had solo exhibitions at David Zwirner Gallery (New York, 1998–2008), 1301PE (Los Angeles, 2000) and the University Museum of Contemporary Art at UMass-Amherst (2014), among others. She also appeared in group shows at Tate Gallery, Pinakothek der Moderne (Munich), Brooklyn Academy of Music and Queens Museum of Art. John Yau wrote, "Schimert isn’t satisfied by either an art that is purely visual … or by one that is essentially social in its concerns. The kind of seeing she is after connects looking outward with looking inward, the gaze merged with reflection."

The exhibition "Dear Mr. Armstrong" (Janice Guy, 1995) included letters of romantic longing from hyperfeminine characters that recalled Surrealist automatic writing and Concrete poetry—and were considered controversial by some feminist critics—alongside handwrought, iridescent, undulating ceramic sculptures titled Moon Rocks. Some of this work was reconfigured for installations at the 1997 Whitney Biennial and her 1999 BAMPFA exhibition, which included new drawings and a letter to Freud.

"War Landscape" (2006) included large watercolor drawings, a garden-like installation of head and tree forms, a life-size figurative sculpture and a bronze head titled after the Roman god of war, Mars. The large, egglike heads (made of cast-paper) and watercolors functioned like topographies, covered with otherworldly, cosmic figurative imagery that Roberta Smith described as violent or therapeutic (e.g., the laying of hands) scenes of "Blakean transformation"; the garden consisted of a barren landscape of large, truncated wire-mesh trees, in various metallic hues.

For "Camouflage, Ink and Silence" (UMass Amherst, 2014), Schimert presented a body of watercolors and glass and ceramic sculptures depicting a mythical, undersea (often transparent) octopus in a state of flux with the ocean. In 2021, she completed a carpet design as part of a partnership between RISD professors and artists and the carpet firm Sahar Carpets to create a contemporary artists' rug collection.

Awards and collections Schimert has received a Guggenheim Fellowship (2020) and awards from the Joan Mitchell Foundation (2020, 1999), Pollock-Krasner Foundation (2001), PS1 (1994) and the Connecticut State Commission on the Arts (1991), among others. Her work belongs to the public collections of the Museum of Modern Art, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, BAMPFA, Fonds régional d'art contemporain (Haute-Normandie, France), Hammer Museum, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Tang Museum, Wanås Foundation (Sweden), among others.