Kim Abeles: Community Smog

The Griffin Foundation Gallery: January 22 to March 14, 2025

Community Smog is a collaboration between artist Kim Abeles and Northern Colorado community members to create Smog Collectors. Abeles has worked with Fort Collins seventh graders, adults at Petrichor Collective, and adults and children at San Lazaro Manufactured Home Park in Boulder to create plates that mimic air quality by collecting particulates from the air on plates or fabric.

On view beside artist- and community-made Smog Collectors will be other works from Abeles’s oeuvre, including Zoë’s Highchair (Forty Days of Smog), Sky Patch, lichen video wall, Sky Leaves, and the tools used in making these atmospheric artworks.

Kim Abeles: Community Smog — “Presidential Commemorative Smog Plates” (1992) Smog (particulate matter) on porcelain plate. The plates were left out longer, depending on the president’s environmental records.

Join us for a special Family Day event in collaboration with the Department of Atmospheric Science and the Center for Environmental Justice on March 1.

ABOUT THE ARTWORK

The London Globe printed a new word “Smog,” coined in a speech at the 1905 Public Health Congress. They considered it a public service to describe this phenomenon.

The Smog Collectors materialize the reality of the air we breathe. I place cut, stencilled images on transparent or opaque plates or fabric, then leave these on the roof of my studio and let the particulate matter in the heavy air fall upon them. After a period of time, from four days to a month, the stencil is removed and the image is revealed in smog. To quote a stranger, they are “footprints of the sky”.

I created the first Smog Collector in 1987 while working on artworks about the “invisible” San Gabriel Mountains, obscured by the smog as I looked from my studio fire escape in downtown Los Angeles. In the 1980s it was common to hear people insist that it was fog, not smog, that filled the air.

The Smog Collectors are presented in several series, including the Presidential Commemorative Smog Plates, all the presidents from McKinley to Bush with their portraits in smog and their quotes about the environment or industry hand-painted in gold around the rims. I left them out on the roof longer, depending on their environmental records.

Subjects for the Smog Collectors include the cave paintings of Lascaux, images of the body, industry and to-scale translations of American landscape painting and photography. Domestic settings, such as Dinner for Two in One Month of Smog, have been important to the dialogue of these works. We live in the contradiction that the dangers are out there, beyond, and that we are safe in our homes. Since the worst in our air can’t be seen, Smog Collectors are both literal and metaphoric depictions of the current conditions of our life source. They are reminders of our industrial decisions: the road we took that seemed so modern.

–kimabeles.com/smog-collectors

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Kim Abeles is an artist whose artworks explore biography, geography, feminism, and the environment. Her work speaks to society, science literacy, and civic engagement, creating projects with the California Science Center, health clinics and mental health departments, and the National Park Service. She has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, J. Paul Getty Trust Fund for the Visual Arts, California Community Foundation and Pollack-Krasner Foundation. In 1987, she innovated a method to create images from the smog in the air, and Smog Collectors brought her work to international attention, and were exhibited early this year at the United Nations Headquarters in New York. Abeles’ journals, artists books and process documents are archived at the Center for Art + Environment, Nevada Museum of Art. Her work is in forty public collections including MOCA, LACMA, Berkeley Art Museum, Brooklyn Museum, California African American Museum, and the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency. Abeles’ process documents are archived at the Center for Art + Environment, Nevada Museum of Art.

SUPPORT

This exhibition and its related publication are made possible through the City of Fort Collins Fort Fund, the City of Fort Collins Cross-Sector Impact Grant, the FUNd Endowment at CSU, and the Lilla B. Morgan Memorial Endowment, which works to enhance cultural development and the arts at Colorado State University. This fund benefits from the generous support of all those who love the arts. https://president.colostate.edu/lilla-b-morgan-endowment/.

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