Kira Nam Greene
From left to right - curator Yasmin Ramirez, artist Chitra Ganesh, artist Kira Nam Greene, curator Julie Lohnes, feminist scholar Ferris Olin at the Panel Discussion "Transnationalism and Women Artists in Diaspora” at the Brooklyn Museum - March 31, 2012
Born
Seoul, Korea
NationalityKorean American
EducationSchool of Visual Arts, MFA, 2004; San Francisco Art Institute, BFA, 2000; Stanford University, PhD in Political Science, 1996; Seoul National University, BA in International Relations, 1988
StyleFeminist, Transnationalism, Pattern and Decoration

Kira Nam Greene is a New York-based painter known for combining ethnographic imagery, meticulous realism, and layered patterns.[1][2] Greene has expressed her commitment to painting as a way to explore feminism, materialism, and beauty.[3][4][5]

Biography

Greene was born in Seoul, Korea and lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.[6] She received a BFA from San Francisco Art Institute and an MFA from the School of Visual Arts. Prior to becoming an artist, Greene earned her PhD in Political Science from Stanford University and a degree in International Relations from Seoul National University.[7][8][9][10]

Career

Greene has exhibited at Sheldon Museum of Art,[11][12] Muskegon Museum of Art,[13] Brown University,[14] Salisbury University,[15] Wave Hill, Bronx Museum of Art,[16] Noyes Museum, A.I.R. Gallery,[17] Accola Griefen Gallery,[18] Lodge Gallery,[19] Kiechel Fine Art[20] and Jane Lombard Gallery.[21] She has also been a visiting artist and lectured at the Brooklyn Museum,[22] Maryland Institute College of Art, Union College,[23] Salisbury University, SFAI, School of Visual Arts, and Rutgers University. She teaches in the MFA and BFA programs at Parsons (The New School).[24] where in 2018 she was the MICA Geneviève McMillan/Reba Stewart Endowed Chair in painting.[25] Also in 2018, she was a semi-finalist for the Outwin Boochever painting prize and a Bennet Prize finalist for women working in figurative painting.[26][27][28] In October 2021, Greene was a finalist for the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery Outwin Boochever painting prize, whose winners were due to be announced on April 29, 2022.[29]

Work

Greene's work primarily focuses on the feminist exploration of painting via a combination of abstract patterns and representational forms.[30][31] This strategy seeks to "defamiliarize natural space and invite extended, sensual encounters with the paintings, where diverse representational modes coexist, and where the body appears as if seen for the first time." Instead of human figures, her earlier work used still lifes, especially food items, as allegorical stand-ins for the female body.[32][33][34] Art writer and curator Emily Colucci commented about Greene's use of food and bodily imagery, "Greene's painting not only provided a twist on Trump's notorious pussy-grabbing comment, but it also hinted at the papaya's vaginal qualities. The painting, particularly in the context of its title, humorously references the long legacy in feminist art of using food as a stand-in for the body as seen in works like Marilyn Minter's 100 Food Porn paintings."[35] Spurred by recent developments in the politics in America, Greene paints women in creative fields, posed to echo historical figurative paintings. Interviewing them and researching their working lives generates ways to render pictorially—through allusions, icons, objects, patterns, and symbols—the rich personhood of the subjects.[36][37] Jorge Daniel Veneciano, former Director of the Sheldon Museum of Art, commenting on the vibrancy of the still-life genre in the era of transnationalism and globalism, states, "Greene's recent painting provides an arch interpretation of the still-life genre and the promises it makes. The pun in the title, Archway to Happiness, may or may not be her intention, but it supports a reading of the work as satirically commenting on the very rhetoric of the genre. It also foregrounds the transnational nature of still lifes, carrying allusions to Celtic, Moorish, and pan-Asian cultures."[38]

Influences

Greene has expressed how the Pattern and Decoration movement of the 1970s and '80s had a large influence on her work.[39] Her adoption of decorative patterns as the political statement of the marginalized also informs the status of her subjects.[40] Greene states that her political science training informs the deep research into her paintings' subjects.[41] Greene has studied under Brett Reichman at SFAI and Jake Berthot at SVA, both of whom she cites as having influenced her approach to painting.[42][43]

References

  1. ↑ Jaegar, William (December 30, 2015). "Artists explore ramifications of repetition". timesunion.com. Time Union. Retrieved August 15, 2020. A notable fourth painter here, Kira Nam Greene, is less about repetition (per se) and more about excess. "Orientalism I" takes a halved cantaloupe and other still life staples and surrounds them with an invasion of vividly detailed plants and flowers that are flattened onto the surface of the painting, more like wallpaper flourishes than part of the pictorial space. Finely detailed, falling somewhere between comedy and nightmare, this and two smaller counterparts are weirdly sublime.
  2. ↑ Adams, Lauren Frances (July 5, 2018). "Ornament, Pattern, and Culture: Kira Nam Greene". bmoreart.com. Bmore Art. Retrieved August 15, 2020. Painter Kira Nam Greene has been working for over the past 15 years since graduating from School of Visual Arts with her MFA. Her large-scale works on paper and installations amalgamate multiple mediums and content, merging realism and abstraction. Mainstays of her work are an ornamental approach to surface, a deep research practice pointing to specific cultural identities, as well as her own lived experience. Her work exhibits an affinity for saturated colors and a painterly absorption of pop grammar.
  3. ↑ Caruth, Nicole (July 27, 2012). "Gastro-Vision:Summer Round Up". art21.org. Art21. Retrieved August 15, 2020. Among them is Kira Nam Greene. She mixes patterns borrowed from unspecified Western and Eastern sources with images of cherries, baked apples, cupcakes and other foods. The two teeth-bearing creatures in Nibble, Nibble, Gnaw, face the direction of a yellow-frosted layer cake and illustrate the desire to consume it. Greene has suggested that her cakes are substitutes for female bodies, and represent both her attraction and repulsion to portrayals of women in visual culture.
  4. ↑ Borah, Santanu (December 27, 2019). "Kira Nam Greene". asiancurator.com. Asian Curator. Retrieved August 15, 2020. I have always been interested in the representation of the female body in all visual cultures. As an immigrant, I am more aware of the contradictions in the plurality of cultures in the present American society. As a feminist, I am repulsed by the objectification of female bodies in art history and popular culture, yet I find myself strongly attracted to the sensuality of these images. This paradox led me to the imagery of food as a metaphor for the idealisation of the female body and the surrogate for the desire to consume and control. This was my first body of work after my MFA from the School of Visual Arts in New York City. As I worked on this series, I was also exploring the ethical and ecological aspects of modern food consumption by juxtaposing mass-produced industrial food with organic, homemade products. Particularly, I subverted the marketing messages of famous brands by placing their advertising slogans out of context, among highly crafted patterns rooted in older cultural traditions, to examine the impact of the proliferation of advertising imagery on our visual culture.
  5. ↑ "Customer Spotlight: Artists in Zuri!". shopzuri.com. Zuri. July 21, 2020. Retrieved August 15, 2020. Kira Nam Greene continues to explore and expand her interests in the sociopolitical arena of female identity and sexuality. This painting was in her recent show, "Women in Possession of Good Fortune," referring to the opening lines of Jane Austen's novel, "Pride and Prejudice" and alludes to both the persistence of sexist assumptions and the achievements made by women from different races, ages and sexual orientations. The combination of representational fidelity and non-traditional geometries in Greene's paintings celebrates the imagination's role in creating a plural and malleable reality.
  6. ↑ "Kira Nam Greene Artist Spotlight". kiechelart.com. Kiechel Fine Art. April 20, 2020. Retrieved August 15, 2020. I have been following what has been happening with Covid-19 closely since the end of January, partly because the virus was raging in South Korea, where I am originally from.
  7. ↑ "Alumni Exhibitions and Events". sfai.edu. San Francisco Art Institute. November 1, 2019. Retrieved August 15, 2020. Women in Possession of Good Fortune - Kira Nam Greene (BFA 2002)
  8. ↑ Adams, Lauren Frances (July 5, 2018). "Ornament, Pattern, and Culture: Kira Nam Greene". bmoreart.com. Bmore Art. Retrieved August 15, 2020. I originally came to the United States to do a PhD in political economy. After my degree, I didn't want to be in academia for various reasons, so I worked as a management consultant, but not really enjoying it. As luck would have it, I had a medical leave of absence from an accident, which allowed me to take a painting class at a community college. I always dreamed of being able to paint, but never had a formal training. When I started this class, I went to bed and woke up in the morning thinking about painting even though I was painting just some still lives. Afterward I just had to find a way to become an artist to have a full-time painting life.
  9. ↑ Vargi, Yasemin (November 11, 2019). "Kira Nam Greene". Artspeak. artspeak.nyc. Retrieved August 15, 2020. Yasemin Vargi: You have a strong academic background in Political Science from Stanford University, specializing in political economy in East Asia, what made you to follow a career in the Art world? Kira Nam Greene: It's more like how I found my way back to art. Growing up in Korea and having done well academically, I never thought I could become a professional artist. Art was supposed to be a nice hobby, not a career for serious people. When I was doing my Ph.D., I realized how I did not love the narrow focus required for academic research. And living in the United States opened my eyes for different possibilities. In Korea, especially when I was growing up, people did not make radical changes in their careers very often and the success was often defined in a very narrow way.
  10. ↑ Oh, Junhyuk (December 9, 2013). "Alumni Nam Ki-ra paints works that capture her identity as an Asian American and woman through various patterns". doffgen.com. Seoul National University Alumni News. Retrieved August 16, 2020. There is an alumni who chose the life of a painter even though he had a deep academic prowess enough to earn a doctorate in political science from Stanford University. The protagonist is Nam Ki-ra (diplomatic 84) alumnus who are active in New York. Nam, who has been active in various parts of the United States, has been active in the United States over 10 years of teaching language when he opened his first solo exhibition.
  11. ↑ "Poetical Fire: Three Centuries of Still Lifes". digitalcommons.unl.edu. University of Nebraska. 2011. Retrieved August 15, 2020.
  12. ↑ "Sheldon Museum Exhibitions - Quick Guides 2019 - Table Manners:Art and Food" (PDF). sheldonartmuseum.org. Sheldon Museum. March 1, 2019. Retrieved August 15, 2020.
  13. ↑ "The Bennett Prize Finalists". muskegonartmuseum.org. Muskegon Art Museum. Retrieved August 15, 2020.
  14. ↑ Gordon, Alison (March 7, 2016). "What to Fo This Week, MARCH 7-13: Storytellers, Dodgeball, And K Pop!". blognonian.com. The Blogonian. Retrieved August 15, 2020. The Sarah Doyle Gallery is proud to present Kira Nam Greene and her show American Feast. Kira Nam Greene creates self portraiture of painted collaged images of food and patterning that represent her pluralistic identity. She employs the imagery of food as a metaphor for the idealized female body and the conflicting desire to consume and control and represent her identity as an Asian-American immigrant woman.
  15. ↑ "Salisbury University Art Galleries Present: Palette An Art Exhibition And Tasting Event". shorebread.com. Shore Bread. February 20, 2014. Retrieved August 15, 2020.
  16. ↑ "Bronx Calling: The First AIM Biennial". bronxmuseum.org. Bronx Museum. June 26, 2011. Retrieved August 15, 2020.
  17. ↑ "Past Fellows - Kira Nam Greene". airgallery.org. A.I.R. Gallery. Retrieved August 15, 2020.
  18. ↑ "Kira Nam Greene - Blue Plate Special". accolagriefen.com. Arccola Griefen Gallery. April 11, 2013. Retrieved August 15, 2020.
  19. ↑ "The Lodge Gallery - For Which It Stands". thelodgegallery.com. The Lodge Gallery. June 28, 2013. Retrieved August 15, 2020.
  20. ↑ "Kiechel Fine Art - Kira Nam Greene". kiechelart.com. Kiechel Fine Art. Retrieved August 15, 2020.
  21. ↑ "Contexture". janelombardgallery.com. Jane Lombard Gallery. June 29, 2016. Retrieved August 15, 2020.
  22. ↑ "Panel Discussion: "Transnationalism and Women Artists in Diaspora"". brooklynmuseum.org. Brooklyn Museum. March 31, 2012. Retrieved August 15, 2020. To recognize women in the arts, and in celebration of National Women's History month, A.I.R. Gallery, the Institute for Women and Art at Rutgers, and The Feminist Art Project copresent a discussion exploring New York's international feminist diaspora community. This panel will also explore the personal experiences of its panelists, Indian American artist Chitra Ganesh; Korean artist Kira Greene;
  23. ↑ "Art Installation Series:By the Patterns by Kira Nam Greene". muse.union.edu. Union College. April 1, 2016. Retrieved August 15, 2020.
  24. ↑ "Kira Nam Greene Part-time Faculty". parsons.edu. The New School Parsons. Retrieved August 15, 2020.
  25. ↑ Adams, Lauren Frances (July 5, 2018). "Ornament, Pattern, and Culture: Kira Nam Greene". bmoreart.com. Bmore Art. Retrieved August 15, 2020. I met Kira when I was interim chair of the Painting Department at Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) this past fall. Kira comes to Baltimore from New York, where she is a full-time artist. Her role at MICA is the Geneviève McMillan/Reba Stewart Endowed Chair in Painting, which was established in 2006 for an annual visiting female artist faculty in painting, whose work explores perspectives from diverse cultures.
  26. ↑ "Exhibition 2019 - Prize Winners, Finalists, Semifinalists". si.edu. Smithsonian Institution. Retrieved August 15, 2020.
  27. ↑ "Kira Nam Greene". thebennettprize.org. The Bennett Prize. Retrieved August 15, 2020. Born in Seoul, Korea, Greene lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. She received her BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute, her MFA from School of Visual Arts, and her BA in international relations from Seoul National University. Prior to becoming an artist, Greene earned her Ph.D. in political science from Stanford University, specializing in political economy in East Asia, and taught a wide variety of subject matters in Political Economy both in academic and business settings. Greene has shown her work widely at venues such as the Sheldon Museum of Art, Brown University, Salisbury University, Wave Hill, Bronx Museum of Art, Noyes Museum, Accola Griefen Gallery, Lodge Gallery, Kiechel Fine Art, A.I.R. Gallery and Jane Lombard Gallery. Her work has been covered in publications such as Artnet News, Art F City, Wallpaper, W Magazine, Lincoln Star Journal, Art21 Blog, Hyphen Magazine, The Korea Daily and New York Art Beat. She was a Stewart MacMillan Chair in Painting at Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore, in 2017-18 and is currently a part-time faculty of at the New School Parsons School of Design Master of Fine Arts program.
  28. ↑ "Artist Bio". MELUS. Las Vegas, Boston: Oxford Academic, University of Las Vegas, Boston College. 43 (1). March 1, 2018. ISSN 0163-755X. Retrieved August 15, 2020. Greene has shown her work widely at venues such as Sheldon Museum of Art, Brown University, Salisbury University, Wave Hill, Bronx Museum of Art, Noyes Museum, Accola Griefen Gallery, Lodge Gallery, Kiechel Fine Art, A. I. R. Gallery, and Jane Lombard Gallery. Her work has been covered in publications such as Artnet News, Art F City, Wallpaper, W Magazine, Lincoln Star Journal, Art21 Blog, Hyphen Magazine, The Korea Daily, and New York Art Beat.
  29. ↑ "National Portrait Gallery Announces Finalists in Sixth Triennial Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition", si.edu, Smithsonian Institure, October 7, 2021, retrieved October 11, 2021, The winners and allotted prize amounts will be announced at the press preview April 29, 2022.
  30. ↑ Laster, Paul (May 1, 2018). "Interview of Kira Nam Greene by Paul Laster". ahlfoundation-akaa.org. Ahl Foundation. Retrieved August 15, 2020. There are two aspects in terms of food where feminism comes in. My interest in the female body and how it is gazed upon and used for the visual pleasure of male audiences. This leads me to see food as a substitute for the female body.
  31. ↑ "The Art Gallery at the College of Staten Island". cuny.edu. CUNY College of Staten Island. Retrieved August 15, 2020. Kira Nam Greene's work explores female sexuality, desire and control through lush still-life paintings of food, surrounded by complex patterns and abstract designs. Imbuing the feminist legacies of Pattern and Decoration Movement with transnational/multicultural patterns, Greene creates colorful paintings that are unique combinations of realism and abstraction, employing diverse media such as oil, acrylic, gouache, watercolor and colored pencil.
  32. ↑ "Kira Nam Greene. Blue Plate Special". wsimag.com. Wall Street International Magazine. April 22, 2013. Retrieved August 15, 2020. Kira Nam Greene's paintings, drawings and custom wallpaper incorporate foodstuffs and patterns, which are transnational in origin. Appropriating from both Western and Eastern sources, the artist refers, in part, to her position as a Korean immigrant woman in America. Making use of victuals for their relationship to the body, Greene depicts fleshy bowls of kimchi, gelatinous mounds of jello and luscious, ripe cherries. The food, both in harmony and discordance with its surroundings, becomes a surrogate for the desire to consume and/or to control.
  33. ↑ Borah, Santanu (December 27, 2019). "Kira Nam Greene". asiancurator.com. Asian Curator. Retrieved August 15, 2020. I have always been interested in the representation of the female body in all visual cultures. As an immigrant, I am more aware of the contradictions in the plurality of cultures in the present American society. As a feminist, I am repulsed by the objectification of female bodies in art history and popular culture, yet I find myself strongly attracted to the sensuality of these images. This paradox led me to the imagery of food as a metaphor for the idealisation of the female body and the surrogate for the desire to consume and control.
  34. ↑ Zaneti, Leandro (March 5, 2018). "Our Great Leader Will Nuke You". codifyart.com. Codify Art. Retrieved August 15, 2020. More recently, Greene's interest in food has expanded into examining ethical aspects of modern food consumption and the proliferation of advertising imagery on our visual culture in a series of paintings of mass produced and brand name food products. In this latest series, Greene combines typical Pop Art tropes with global motifs, subverting the marketing slogans out of context among highly crafted patterns rooted in older cultural traditions.
  35. ↑ Colucci, Emily (March 23, 2017). "Finding Light (And An Ode To The Ass) In The 2017 Whitney Houston Biennial". artfcity.com. Art Fag City. Retrieved August 15, 2020. Greene's painting not only provided a twist on Trump's notorious pussy-grabbing comment, but it also hinted at the papaya's vaginal qualities. The painting, particularly in the context of its title, humorously references the long legacy in feminist art of using food as a stand-in for the body as seen in works like Marilyn Minter's 100 Food Porn paintings. Like Grab It By The Papaya, many of the works in the Whitney Houston Biennial depicted the female body in some manner.
  36. ↑ Laster, Paul (May 1, 2018). "Interview of Kira Nam Greene by Paul Laster". ahlfoundation-akaa.org. Ahl Foundation. Retrieved August 15, 2020. I would describe my work as a combination of realist painting and abstraction with the use of patterns and decorations. My subject matter has changed, especially since last year with the election of Donald Trump [as the President of the United States] as I subsequently struggled with the political environment and what's happening to society and culture in general. I was painting still lifes of food surrounded by abstract patterns until early 2017. Since then I have changed direction to produce figurative work - portraiture such as you see here in the studio now.
  37. ↑ Vargi, Yasemin (November 11, 2019). "Kira Nam Greene". artspeak.nyc. Artspeak NYC. Retrieved August 15, 2020. I have to start answering this question to tell you why I started painting portraits of women. When Donald Trump got elected as President in 2016, I had a really difficult time focusing on art in my studio like so many other artists (especially women). But participating in Women's March after his inauguration, I got so inspired by the potential of collective action by women and wanted to depict that energy in the studio. I started to think about all my amazingly talented friends who are engaged in all kinds of creative endeavors and wanted to celebrate their gift, their "good fortune" in portraiture. This is also partly motivated by how women have portrayed in art historical tradition. Many portraits of men include symbols of their profession or accomplishments in the painting whereas women are portrayed just as wives or beautiful ornaments. I wanted to create portraits of women which would show their history, accomplishments, and tastes. For this particular exhibition at Lyons Wier Gallery, all the women in the portraits are my very close friends or acquaintances that I have admired for a long time. I feel truly blessed to be surrounded by so many women with such accomplishments and focus and diversity.
  38. ↑ Veneciano, Jorge Daniel; Ruud, Brandon; Katz, Wendy; Griffey, Randall; Farber, Janet; Feit, Sarah (January 2011). Poetical Fire, Three Centuries of Still Lifes. Lincoln, Nebraska: Sheldon Museum of Art Catalogues and Publications. p. 63. We should ask what promises are implied by such still lifes. Albert Einstein captured this promise in his remark that a table, a chair, a bowl of fruit and a violin are all that one needs to be happy. Happiness attends the promise of still lifes. Does this traditional rhetoric hold today? Kira Greene's recent painting provides an arch interpretation of the still life genre and the promises it makes. The pun in the title, Archway to Happiness, may or may not be her intention, but it supports a reading of the work as satirically commenting on the very rhetoric of the genre. It also foregrounds the transnational nature of still lifes, carrying allusions to Celtic, Moorish, and pan Asian cultures.
  39. ↑ "Visual Feast: A Pattern And Decoration Exhibition at Accola Griefen Gallery". islandlass.wordpress.com. IslandLass. July 15, 2012. Retrieved August 15, 2020. This exhibition includes many of the originators of P&D including: Mary Grigoriadis, Miriam Schapiro, Joyce Kozloff, Robert Kushner and Robert Zakanitch. It also presents current practitioners who are employing the methods and aesthetics of the "Decorative" such as Kira Nam Greene, Susan Happersett and Charles Koegel.
  40. ↑ Vargi, Yasemin (November 11, 2019). "Kira Nam Greene". Artspeak. artspeak.nyc. Retrieved August 15, 2020. I share the feminist legacy of the "Pattern and Decoration Movement" from the 70s when artists started to pay attention to the marginalization of what was considered non-Western, feminine and decorative.
  41. ↑ Adams, Lauren Frances (July 5, 2018). "Ornament, Pattern, and Culture: Kira Nam Greene". bmoreart.com. Bmore Art. Retrieved August 15, 2020. When I am painting realistically, I am not just trying to copy something exactly I am searching for the patterns and geometry that consist the essence of a thing or being: what makes a human human; contemplation of racial differences in deciding skin tones. These are not just aesthetically decisions but also political decisions and analysis. So realism is a stand that I take even though it is a love/hate relationship.
  42. ↑ "Brett Reichman Professor Painting". sfai.edu. San Francisco Art Institute. Retrieved August 15, 2020.
  43. ↑ Smith, Roberta (January 14, 2015). "Jake Berthot, a Painter Inspired by the Natural World, Dies at 75". The New York Times. Retrieved August 15, 2020. He taught for extended periods at the Cooper Union, Yale University and the School of Visual Arts.
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