Kim Abeles: Community Smog

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

Community Smog results from a collaboration between the artist Kim Abeles and Northern Colorado community members to create Smog Collectors—works that illustrate air quality. Smog Collector images are created by placing stencils on plates or fabric and leaving them outside to collect particulate matter from the air. The worse the air quality, the darker the image. Most of the Collectors on view in this exhibition were created by Fort Collins seventh graders, adults at Petrichor Collective, members of the Air Quality Monitoring Advisory Committee, and resident families at a manufactured home park in the Boulder area, all of whom worked with Abeles as part of “Air Quality Through the Arts,” a local project designed to educate the public about particle pollution and its effects.

Other artworks from Abeles’s oeuvre are on view alongside these community-made Smog Collectors and speak to the environment, civic engagement, and science literacy. Also included are scientific tools used to measure air quality, on loan from Colorado State University’s Department of Atmospheric Science and CSU’s Powerhouse Energy Campus.

Community Smog is presented in collaboration with the Center for Environmental Justice and the Department of Atmospheric Science. Support for this exhibition and related programming is provided by 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. The larger project, “Air Quality Through the Arts,” is made possible by the Environmental Protection Agency and the Colorado Creative Industries Arts in Society Grant.

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 ARTWORKS

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. Mountain Wedge documents a 14-month effort to see the mountains clearly, and a related artwork, Sky Patch, matched the color of the sky over sixty days to compare the same spot in paint.

Subjects for the Smog Collectors have included ancient cave paintings, images of the human body, industry, domestic settings of the home, and to-scale translations of idyllic landscape painting and photography. And workshops to use the process to discuss the environment were developed as early as 1994, followed by the Environmental Activity Book funded by the City of Los Angeles Dept of Cultural Affairs (1995).

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.

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 science and natural history museums, health departments, air pollution control agencies, National Park Service, and community organizations.

In 1987, she innovated a method to create images from the smog in the air, and Smog Collectors brought her work to international attention. Projects funded by National Endowment for the Arts involved a residency at the Institute of Forest Genetics where she focused on Resilience; and Valises for Camp Ground: Arts, Corrections, and Fire Management in the Santa Monica Mountains in collaboration with Camp 13, a group of female prison inmates who fight wildfires.

Permanent outdoor works include Walk a Mile in My Shoes, based on the shoes of the Civil Rights marchers and local activists; and, Citizen Seeds, six sculptures along the Park to Playa Trail.

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. Her work is in public collections including MOCA, LACMA, California African American Museum, Berkeley Art Museum, and National Geospatial Intelligence Agency. Abeles’ journals, artists books and process documents are archived at the Center for Art + Environment, Nevada Museum of Art. She is Professor Emerita at California State University Northridge.

On view in this exhibition are also Zoë’s Highchair (Forty Days of Smog) and table settings created in smog, Smog Translations of idyllic landscapes, World Leaders in Smog, the installation Waiting/Watching, and ancillary works from Sky Patch, Sky Leaves, and Mountain Wedge, which speak to the environment, civic engagement, and science literacy. Also on view are Presidential Commemorative Smog Plates, a body of work that has been on the road since 1992, most recently at United Nations Headquarters in New York in 2024.

SUPPORT

Community Smog is presented in collaboration with the Center for Environmental Justice and the Department of Atmospheric Science at CSU, and the City of Fort Collins and Larimer County.

Support for this exhibition and related programming is provided by 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/.

The larger project, “Air Quality Through the Arts,” is made possible by the Environmental Protection Agency and the Colorado Creative Industries Arts in Society Grant.

Fort Fund logo