Oct 15, 2024 NOW ON DISPLAY! BETWEEN SPIRITS AND MATTER: WORKS BY BETH KRENSKY

“I am a gatherer of things-objects, words, spirit-and a connector of fragments, to make us whole.”  – Beth Krensky

Skirt of Sorrow and Forgiveness
2014
The artist’s wedding dress crinoline, father’s handkerchiefs, and metal lettering

Between Spirit and Matter is an installation of performance pieces and ritual artifacts by the Utan-based artist Beth Krensky. An acclaimed art educator and maker, her work draws upon Mircea Eliade’s definition of sanctuaries as “doors of the gods’ and hence places of passage between heaven and earth.” Krensky embraces the inherent liminality of these transitional plains in an effort to sanctify bodies, spaces, and objects through her artistic process. The exhibition invites viewers to inhabit the sphere Krensky does herself: the in-between of matter and spirit, profane and sacred. -Maddie Blonquist Shrum, curator

The exhibition will be on display on Level two of the J. Willard Marriott Library October 10, 2024 through December 19, 2024.

Dispatch from Solitude #1: Walking the Unknown Path
2020
Performance stills, archival pigment print
Photo Credit: Cam McLeod

Beth Krensky is a Distinguished Professor of Art Teaching in the Department of Art & Art History at the University of Utah. She is an artist working in the border zone between social issues and the sacred who creates objects and performative gestures as a contemplative act.

She received her formal art training from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University and MIT’s Center for Advanced Visual Studies. She holds an M.Ed. from the Harvard Graduate School of Education and a Ph.D. in Educational Foundations from the University of Colorado at Boulder. She is also a scholar of youth-created art for social change. Her writing addresses community-based art education, youth activist art, and art for social change. Her co-authored book (with Seana Lowe Steffen), Engaging Classrooms and Communities through Art, is used widely in the field of community-based art education.

In 2022, Krensky was named the Utah Higher Education Art Educator of the Year and in 2019, she was selected as one of Utah’s 15 Most Influential Artists. Yale University recently exhibited a 20-year retrospective of her art. Among her academic honors, she has been awarded the Presidential Scholar, Public Service Professor, and Distinguished Teaching awards from the University of Utah.

She was one of five performance art finalists for the 16th Arte Laguna Prize.

Portal
2005
Copper, gold leaf

Performance Pieces can be viewed on the Institute of Sacred Music website. Access to performance pieces can be found using this link. This exhibition is free and open to the public.