Majestic, 2024
Dancing with Sweetgrass
Works by Kim Weston
August 27 – October 18, 2026
Drumming Performance, Artist Talk and Reception: Sunday, April 12, 1–3 p.m. (performance and talk @ 1:30 p.m.)
Virtual Artist Talk: Thursday, October 1, 7–8 p.m. Registration required
The Clare Gallery opens its fall season with our third exhibition honoring “voices left out at the founding of our country.” American artist Kim Weston was born in Philadelphia raised in New York City and South Carolina. At a young age, she regularly ventured forth on “wisdom walks” with her indigenous grandmother (Cherokee) exploring where spirituality intersected with her identity as a Black and Native American woman. This exploration into her ancestral and spiritual heritage further expanded after a near-death experience heightened Weston’s curiosity to examine the link between the worlds of the “seen and the unseen.”
In Weston’s exhibition, Dancing with Sweetgrass, the viewer is confronted with massive, heavily blurred, colorful photographs. The scale envelops the viewer. Formally, we are seduced by the motion, lines, colors, textures, and contrast of light and shapes. Conceptually, they challenge our sense of “knowing,” prompting questions such as: What do we see? What can we truly understand and connect with? Up close, the images dissolve into abstraction, while distance reveals new forms. Dancing with Sweetgrass plays with abstraction while photographing the country’s Powwow circuit and its dancers. The photographs blur past and present ancestry while creating shifting figures that challenge fixed ideas of identity and what is “seen and known.”
Weston is most interested in creating work about Black and Native experiences and connecting it to her spiritual traditions. She chooses to utilize photography to add to our cultural conversation. Past exhibitions have emphasized memorial of disappeared Native American women; works reflecting on personal loss, memory, and future generations; as well as exposed light that appears to create “spirits” of her relatives within liminal spaces. Weston shares, “I use photography often arranged in built-out mixed media installations, as a personal vehicle for storytelling and claiming agency over the complexities of my mixed race identity and the ancestrally rich Spirit world we occupy.”
Weston has exhibited for the past 30+ years in New England’s galleries and museums. Her work is in the collections of Yale University, The DeCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, the Housatonic Museum of Art, and the Arts Council of Greater New Haven. She has secured varied awards, grants, and press including the prestigious Director’s Fellowship from the International Center for Photography in New York City. Kim Weston has a BFA from Cooper Union and an MFA from Bard College. In 2021, she founded Wabi Gallery, New Haven, CT, a teaching and exhibition space featuring Connecticut-based emerging national artists. More information can be found at wabi.gallery.
