ARTIST STATEMENT
I’m a visual artist working in a variety of media. My practice engages questions of identity, community, healing, and hope, challenging viewers to consider issues of social justice and human rights. With multiple identities as a queer, mixed-ethnicity, diasporan American, I’m passionate about amplifying diverse voices that inspire change and highlighting the role that women play in the survival and evolution of cultures and communities. My art touches the ancestral while envisioning and embodying a futurist perspective of compassion and community. It stimulates connection and empathy in viewers, among the most important experiences for transformational thinking that envisions positive futures.
“Our Blue Planet” is from a series of collage works challenging us to investigate our relationship to the natural world. It asks us to understand our place within it, not in a patriarchal hierarchy with humans on top, but as creatures who are integral parts of the ecosystems we inhabit.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Kristin Anahit Cass is an artist working in photography, video, writing, sculpture and other media. Cass’s work imagines the future, touches the past, and envisions a better world. As Lori Waxman noted in New City, her “portraits, of both people and places, are composed with a tender straightforwardness that befits each particular subject. Instead of the aestheticized ruins of disaster porn, moments of human resilience shine through alongside the trauma.” In addition to her arts education, Cass has worked with women and minority owned businesses, artists, and nonprofits in her career as a lawyer. She is one of the founders of the LGBTQ platform Entanik (Family) where she is active in supporting creatives in the global community.
Her work has been shown in solo and group exhibitions at the University of Michigan, Elephant Room Gallery, Hairpin Gallery, Co-Prosperity Sphere Gallery, ARC Gallery, Jackson Junge Gallery, Woman Made Gallery, and Hyde Park Art Center among others. Her Borderlands Under Fire project was a finalist for the 2018 Dorothea Lange-Paul Taylor Prize. Cass is a graduate of the University of Chicago.
© Kristin Anahit Cass