Katharen Wiese

Katharen Wiese is a multidisciplinary artist from Lincoln, NE, residing in New Haven, Connecticut. She holds a B.F.A. in Studio Art from the University of Nebraska at Lincoln (2018) and an MFA from Yale University (2024).  Wiese is a Community-Engaged Teaching Fellow at the University of New Haven (24’ - 26’) and an Artist in Residence at the Eli Whitney Museum and Workshop (24’ - 26’). Her work has been featured recently in exhibitions at Chilli Art Projects (London), SPURS Gallery (Beijing), the Yale Peabody Natural History Museum (New Haven), Yossi Milo Gallery (New York) , David Castillo Gallery (Miami), the Clarinda Carnegie Art Museum (Iowa), and Toshkova Fine Art Advisory (Durham, NC). 

Artist Statement

Situated within my experience of dualities as a biracial black Nebraskan, the patchwork is a primary form holding the simultaneity of subject positions. In quilts, paintings, and assemblages my practice collapses histories of movement: the trans-Atlantic slave trade, the first and second wave of the Great Migration, and the flyways of migrating birds. There are the big movements and then there are slips: racial passing, subtle performances of gender and race.

In 1969, my mother’s family took flight, and went north to Nebraska, seeking opportunity and fleeing the violence of the Jim Crow South. After that long drive, after T Town, sundown town, school bussing, and red lining; after all. Crossing the Mason Dixon line, over and under, through and through, it is still the same visitor, still the thread of black actuality, piercing the American landscape. 

The term high yellow was historically attributed to Black people with light skin, some of whom participated in discriminatory practices like the Brown Bag Test. Yellowness, or this state of being between races and spaces, can mean colorism, can mean oppression, can mean … and that is where I am most interested: the point of flux which contends with binary systems of logic. In this manner, the fugitivity of non-archival found materials, the yellowing of a sheet of cardboard, speaks to the instability of racial subject positions in my material practice.