OCTOBER 25, 2024 – FEBRUARY 9, 2025

Location: Chellgren Gallery, Second Floor, North Building
Curator: Tyler Blackwell and Robert Wiesenberger

The Speed Art Museum, in collaboration with the Clark Art Institute, is proud to present a new exhibition of New York-based artist Kathia St. Hilaire (American, born 1995). Informed by her experience growing up in Afro-Caribbean neighborhoods in South Florida, St. Hilaire seeks to celebrate and illuminate the complex histories of the communities she comes from through innovative, mixed-media studio processes.

Trained as a printmaker, the artist uses a reduction relief printing technique in which she creates designs on sheets of linoleum and then scrupulously carves portions and weaves together multiple panels. This is followed by print “runs” on sometimes unconventional materials—rubber tires, industrial metals, beauty product packaging, and fabrics—and further painting by hand, leading to layered images that resemble contemporary frescoes.

St. Hilaire’s compelling two- and three-dimensional works for this exhibition are concerned with ideas of social mobility, cultural identity, and colonial legacies of “The Banana Wars,” which were a series of conflicts that consisted of police actions, American military occupations, and imperial interventions across Latin America from 1898 to 1934. The artist views this period as a “starting point” for sociocultural and political misconceptions about the region within the United States. Inspired by historical events, as well as Haitian and Latin American mythology, St. Hilaire’s artworks fuse the present with the past, spotlighting the lingering, otherwise invisible impacts “The Banana Wars” has had on contemporary society.

A recent work by Kathia St. Hilaire is included in the Speed Art Museum’s exhibition The Bitter and the Sweet: Kentucky Sugar Chests, Enslavement, and the Transatlantic World 1790-1865, which is on view from November 15, 2023—April 7, 2024.

Kathia St. Hilaire received her MFA in Painting and Printmaking at the Yale School of Art. Her work has recently been featured in exhibitions at the NSU Art Museum, Fort Lauderdale; Perrotin, New York; the Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs; Half Gallery, New York; Blum & Poe, New York; and James Fuentes, New York.

Current Speed: Kathia St. Hilaire — Invisible Empires is co-curated by Tyler Blackwell, Curator of Contemporary Art at Speed Art Museum and Robert Wiesenberger, Curator of Contemporary Projects at the Clark Art Institute. This exhibition is organized as a collaboration between the Speed Art Museum and the Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, MA.

A version of this exhibition is on view at the Clark Art Institute from May 11 to September 22, 2024.

Current Speed is a series of changing contemporary art exhibitions and focus presentations that introduce the Kentuckiana community to new and emerging artists as well as celebrated mid-career artists previously underrecognized in the region. Current Speed exhibitions are open to the public and included with general museum admission.

The Current Speed exhibition series is initiated and organized by Tyler Blackwell, Curator of Contemporary Art at Speed Art Museum.

PRESS RELEASE