Kristy Hughes
Kristy Hughes is a painter, sculptor, and educator. She received an MFA from Indiana University and her MA and BA from Eastern Illinois University. She has completed residencies at the Hambidge Center for Creative Arts and Sciences, The Studios at MASS MoCA, a Vermont Studio Center full fellowship, and Residency Unlimited in Brooklyn, NY.
She has been published in New American Paintings, Friend of the Artist, and Create Magazine, among others. She has exhibited widely in the US, with recent and upcoming solo and two-person exhibitions at The University of South Carolina - Aiken; Plough Gallery, Tifton, GA; Turner Center for the Arts, Valdosta, GA; Coker University, Hartsville, SC; and Gaston College, Dallas, NC. Hughes is Visiting Assistant Professor at Indiana University and the Residency Coordinator for the Elizabeth Murray Artist Residency.
Hughes' work is a political statement in the same vein as other women artists where space is a critical feature, claiming attention, staking and holding space. Claiming space on a wall, Real estate in a room, Occupying the attention and mind of a viewer. Hughes uses sculpture and installation to make her claim.
Hughes' work among other Female artists who are making statements about a spatial visual practice have a wide legacy in art history. These works empower by demanding space for the artist, for their ideas, their physical bodies, for themselves. Pushing back against the disempowerment and the historical overreaches of the patriarchy.
Her work also utilizes a careful and strong use of bright colour. Repetition and patterns all affirming the already physically claimed space on the surface of a sculpture.
There is a painterly quality to her work that displays a high regard of freedom, spontaneity and personal expression. Movement naturally produced a variety of technical and aesthetic additions like that of the Abstract Expressionist with the two major tendencies: action painting and color field painting.
Hughes, speaking of her own work:
“I make sculptures and paintings about empowerment, silliness, and the ‘audacity’ of giving yourself permission to take up space.
“The playful forms, bold colors, and piecemealed compositions represent moments of sureness and being unapologetic. The work is emphatically optimistic, an embodiment of my own search for agency and autonomy, a deliberate push-back to our patriarchal society. The work is a celebration, against the odds.”
