5 "must see" Michigan Women Artists
Since All SHE Makes was founded in Lansing MI, we wanted to give a shutout to a few of the incredible artists recently added to our womxn artists directory. Give them a follow!
Lauren Kalman
Kalman’s work draws you in instantaneously by her intriguing marrying of jewelry and various mechanisms, which look like they all belong in a world of disturbing medicine. The feeling of an unfamiliar discomfort washes over the viewer but in a strangely familiar way.
Lauren’s series “Devices for Filling a Void” combines jewelry, with forms reminiscent of reconstructive surgical devices and amorphous bodily forms. Rather than presenting or holding the body in an ideal position, they distort the body through actions that are sometimes grotesque or violent. The objects literally fill the voids of the body, but the forms also imply a psychological filling of emotional or erotic voids. The work points to ideas about women being incomplete or lacking, requiring augmentation by men, objects, dress, makeup and adornment.
Lauren Kalman is a visual artist based in Detroit, whose practice is rooted in the history of adornment, contemporary craft, sculpture, video, photography and performance. Through her work she investigates constructions of the ideal, the politics of craft, the body, and the built environment through performances using her body.
Kalman exhibits and lectures internationally. Her work has been featured in exhibitions at the Renwick Gallery at the Smithsonian Museum of American Art, Museum of Contemporary Craft, Museum of Arts and Design, Cranbrook Art Museum, Contemporary Art Museum Houston, Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Mint Museum, and the World Art Museum in Beijing, among others. Her work is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, the Smithsonian Museum of American Art, and the Detroit Institute of Art.
She has been awarded residencies at the Bemis Center, the Australian National University, the Corporation of Yaddo, Virginia Center for Creative Arts, Brush Creek Arts Foundation, Haystack, and Santa Fe Art Institute. She has received Ponyide, Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation, Puffin Foundation West and ISE Cultural Foundation Emerging Curator grants.
She has taught at institutions including Brown University and the Rhode Island School of Design. Currently she is an associate professor at Wayne State University.
Find more of her amazing work laurenkalman.com and IG: @laurenkalman
Teresa Dunn
Teresa Dunn is a Mexican American artist raised in rural Southern Illinois. Her identity, life, and art is poetically influenced by being suspended between two cultural heritages. Language, space, color, light, and storytelling find expressiveness through moving toward and away from simultaneously contradictory tensions. Gloria Anzaldúa’s “Borderlands” accurately reflects Dunn’s own reconciliation of her mexicansimo with her American-ness and the complexities of growing up and living as multicultural woman in the Midwest.
Teresa Dunn received her MFA from Indiana University Bloomington in 2002. She is a three-time recipient of the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Fellowship and received the Jacob K Javits Fellowship from the US Department of Education. Dunn is represented by First Street Gallery in NYC and Galerie l’Échaudé in Paris, France. Recent solo exhibitions include M o t h e r l o a d at the Visual Arts Center at the Washington Pavilion in Sioux Falls, SD in 2017 and First Street Gallery in NYC and Miami University of Ohio in 2016, and Ebb and Ember at Hooks-Epstein Galleries in 2015. Dunn’s 2012 exhibition Strange realities/Étrange réalité at Galerie l’Échaudé was reviewed in French journals AZART and Miroir de l’Art. Dunn was a finalist in the 2000 William and Dorothy Yeck Miami University Young Painters Competition and won Best in Show at the 2008 Biennial of Contemporary Realism at the Fort Wayne Museum of Art in Fort Wayne, Indiana.
She has been included in numerous publications including Studio Visits and Paint Pulse Magazine. Dunn was accepted for the inaugural year of the Cuttyhunk Island Artist Residency with featured artist Alex Kanevsky in 2017. She has conducted many visiting artist lectures including the most recent 2017 lecture and student critiques at the Rome Art Program in Rome, Italy. Teresa Dunn is currently an Associate Professor of Painting and Drawing at Michigan State University in East Lansing where she has taught since 2006.
Learn more about her work teresa-dunn.com IG: @teresa.m.dunn
Kelly Hansen
For the past year Kelly has almost exclusively painted portraits. All of these portraits are of people she has some sort of positive connection to, and she found it interesting to spend time looking closely at their faces while considering the stories and emotions that arose as she worked. Kelly enjoyed the slow looking, something that often feels too vulnerable to do in person. She has always been fascinated with the relationship between a person’s outer appearance and their inner story. In some cases, the subject’s expression seems to convey one feeling while the truth is something else. She loves how interesting and complex people are, and tries to capture a little of that in her paintings.
Kelly is a graphic designer and a museum exhibit designer. She paints in her free time. She loves to create portraits that capture the personality of the people she’s painting. Kelly’s artwork has been shown at the Scarab Club in Detroit, the Ann Arbor Art Center, and the South Haven Center for the Arts. She is based in Okemos, MI
Find more of Kelly’s work: IG @artonthesidekh website: https://kelly6964.wixsite.com/mysite
Rebecca Casement
Rebecca creates honest and emotive abstract sculptures using ceramics, mixed media, and textiles to call attention to the moments in life that alter who you are and how you see the world. Her creative research is focused on the physiological and psychological impact that occurs when the human body is altered by adverse natural occurrences like disease, or external forces like assault or abuse. Casement strives to create an intimate look at emotions and experiences that are often considered private, with the goal of giving voice back to those who have experienced adversity.
Rebecca Casement is a visual artist that creates affective abstract sculptures and installations using ceramics, mixed media, and textiles. Her work beautifully calls to attention the moments in life that alter who you are and how you see the world. She received her MFA in Studio Art from Michigan State University in May 2020. She was awarded the Glen Arbor Arts Center Artist in Residence in 2019 and has been included in the juried online directory, All She Makes and the art blog Synthetic Meatball. Her work has been included in numerous solo, small group, national and international juried exhibitions including Tangent Gallery in Detroit, the Michigan Institute of Contemporary Art in Lansing, Michigan, Buckham Gallery in Flint, Michigan, as well as the Cloyde Snook Gallery in Alamosa, Colorado.
Learn more about Rebecca and her work: rebeccacasement.com IG: @rmcasement_art
Mia Risberg
Mia is a visual artist based in Ann Arbor, Michigan, painting in a variety of mediums, such as acrylics, oils, and cold wax medium. Born in Sweden, she spent her childhood often moving and living in various countries before settling in the United States as a young adult.
Nature and its visual details are a steady source of inspiration for her. She is interested in the tension between humans and nature, and the notion of the natural world around us as being strong and resilient, at times unsettling or mysterious. She is also interested in the depiction of places and memories. These can be remembered or imagined, and sometimes ambiguous or undefined. Mia appreciates the materiality of paint and her process often involves some experimentation with color mixing and mark making.
If you’d like to hear more about her work, please listen to her interview The Viewer Makes the Narrative on the Off-Leash Arts Podcast, check out her impressive CV via miarisberg.com or IG @miarisbergart
