Crows Shadow is excited to share the news of our 2019 Golden Spot residency award recipients: Yoshihiro Kitai, Yoonhee Choi, and Natalie Ball. Funded by the generous support of The Ford Family Foundation, the annual Golden Spot Awards began at Crow’s Shadow Institute of the Arts (CSIA) in 2010 to support regional artist residencies. Each of these Oregon-based artists will spend two weeks at Crow’s Shadow developing limited-edition prints, which will be hand pulled by Crow’s Shadow’s collaborative master printer, Judith Baumann. The final prints will enter our permanent collection; in previous years prints from the Golden Spot residencies have travelled extensively to galleries and cultural institutions around the region and nationally. All three of these artists will be working in the Crow’s Shadow studio for the first time.
Yoshihiro Kitai is an Assistant Professor of printmaking at the Pacific Northwest College of Art in Portland, Oregon. Originally from Osaka, Japan, Kitai moved to the United States in 1994 after studying at Tajimi Ceramic School in Gifu. Kitai holds a BFA in Printmaking from the Pacific Northwest College of Art (2002) and received his MFA in Printmaking and Drawing from Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri in 2004. Kitai is represented by Froelick Gallery in Portland. Kitai will be an Artist-in-Residence at CSIA during August 2019.
Kitai primarily makes work on paper, using drawing, painting, and printmaking, combined with the sensibilities of practice and repetition he learned making pottery. He frequently uses a Japanese type of pigment similar to watercolor called gansai, creating tiny dots or brush strokes meditatively repeated into seas of rhythmic patterns. He emphasizes surface and material contrast by using passages of gold or silver leaf which evoke the stylized clouds of traditional Japanese screen paintings. The shimmering metallic surfaces pulse between foreground and background, leaving openings later filled in with delicate, undulating points of pigment. A limited color palette highlights the subtle shift in gradients as the paint in each brush stroke fades after its initial saturation. The resultant works feel simultaneously restrained and joyful, eliciting a sense of orderly quietude.
Yoonhee Choi is a multidisciplinary artist, often using paper and installation components in her art. Choi’s background in planning and architecture informs her visual explorations, which include processes of reordering. Her works using everyday materials seem to reinvent items, breathing new life into found objects. The re-categorization feels both playful and analytical, such as in Best By, where she pinned hundreds of plastic bread tags, like specimens, to a gallery wall. The orderly clusters of colorful squares look mapped into place, invoking arial views of houses or jaunty buildings. A similar methodology exists in her collages, which incorporate tiny geometric shapes cut from bits of brightly hued tape, sometimes strung together in loops and other times held in place by the implied lines of her compositions. She currently lives in Portland, Oregon, where she showed at Blackfish Gallery for eight years. Choi will be an Artist-in-Residence at CSIA from the end of September into October of 2019.
Choi has a Bachelor of Engineering in City Planning from Hong-ik University in Seoul, South Korea; a Master of Architecture from Yale University in New Haven, CT; and a Diploma of Fine Arts from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA. She recently completed an artist residency with C3 Initiative in Portland, and taught architecture at Portland State University from 2007-2016.
Natalie Ball (Klamath Modoc) is a multidisciplinary and installation artist who works from her ancestral homelands in the rural community of Chiloquin, OR (Klamath County). As a young woman she learned quilt making from her aunt, which has fueled a continual practice of challenging assumptions regarding materials, including the loaded politics and power of matrilineal craft. Often mining found objects for her installations, Ball perennially incorporates seemingly incongruous materials into provocative objects that both carry their own stories while inviting dialogue with viewers.
Raised in Portland, Oregon, Ball has a Bachelor of Arts in Art and Ethnic Studies from University of Oregon (2005), a Masters in Maori Visual Arts (2010) from Massey University in New Zealand, and a MFA in Painting and Printmaking (2018) from Yale School of Art in New Haven, CT. Ball was the winner of the prestigious 2018 Betty Bowen Award, with a forthcoming solo exhibition at the Seattle Art Museum scheduled for 2019. She has shown widely around the states as well as internationally, including: Whitney Biennial 2017, New York; Diane Rosenstein Gallery, Los Angeles; the Museum of Contemporary Native Arts (MoCNA), Santa Fe; and Art Mûr in both Montréal, Québec and Berlin, Germany. Ball will be an Artist-in-Residence at CSIA during November 2019.
