ARTIST STATEMENT
This recent work focuses on the daily atrocities of war and its devastation on human populations in villages and cities of Ukraine. The ongoing conflict is unjust and truly heartbreaking. It has created one of the fastest large-scale displacements of children since World War II, accounting for 75,000 child refugees each day. In addition to this crisis, 4.6 million people have limited access to safe water—with an estimated 1.4 million lacking access entirely. How do we even begin to mend the spoils of war when women and children are targeted as they flee, and when bombs are marked “for the children”?
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Cynthia Kerby is a visual artist, former design professor, jewelry designer, curator, and co-founder of True Ideas, a design studio in Evanston. She shows familiar objects in unfamiliar ways and makes observations of life’s frailties or uncertainties through a lens of personal awareness and curiosity. Her focus is to create work that facilitates change in human behavior and the role she plays in promoting public awareness towards action.
Cynthia’s visual art has been included in ArtPrize, and shown at the Art Center Highland Park, Evanston Art Center, Noyes Cultural Arts Center, 1100 Florence Gallery, at Woman Made Gallery and The Gunder Mansion in Chicago, at White Bear Center for the Arts in Minnesota, in the Port Townsend Wearable Art Exhibition, at the Center for the Arts at Mission Point, and at the Taubman Center for Design Education, in Detroit.
Cynthia has curated exhibitions at The Westchester Children’s Museum in New York and at Space 900 in Evanston. She was a featured artist in (Re) An Ideas Journal in New York and also a recipient of a Ragdale Foundation Artist Residency in Lake Forest, Illinois. Cynthia earned her MFA in Visual Communication from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
© Cynthia Kerby