Kim MacConnel (born 1946 in

Oklahoma City Oklahoma City (), officially the City of Oklahoma City, and often shortened to OKC, is the List of capitals in the United States, capital and List of municipalities in Oklahoma, most populous city of the U.S. state of Oklahoma. The county seat ...

, Oklahoma) is an American artist who works with painting, sculpture, and

mixed media In visual art, mixed media describes work of art, artwork in which more than one Art medium, medium or material has been employed. Assemblages, collages, and sculpture are three common examples of art using different List of art media, media. M ...

collage Collage (, from the , "to glue" or "to stick together") is a technique of art creation, primarily used in the visual arts, but in music too, by which art results from an assembly of different forms, thus creating a new whole. (Compare with pasti ...

/fabric. MacConnel is a seminal figure in the

Pattern and Decoration A pattern is a regularity in the world, in human-made design, or in abstract ideas. As such, the elements of a pattern repeat in a predictable manner. A geometric pattern is a kind of pattern formed of geometric shapes and typically repeated li ...

movement of the seventies, but overall MacConnel's oeuvre has surpassed being categorized. MacConnel received his BA, with honors, from the University of California, San Diego in 1969 and his MFA, also with honors, in 1972.

Career

MacConnel had a lot of trouble starting out as an artist due to the fact that he had to come up against the

minimalism In visual arts, music, and other media, minimalism is an art movement that began in the post-war era in western art. The movement is often interpreted as a reaction to abstract expressionism and modernism; it anticipated contemporary post-mi ...

of the time in the 1970s. During the Minimalist movement, artists weren't interested in color or even painting for the most part; MacConnel's art just wasn't accepted as serious. It also had partly to do with his material, instead of painting on stretched

canvas Canvas is an extremely durable Plain weave, plain-woven Cloth, fabric used for making sails, tents, Tent#Marquees and larger tents, marquees, backpacks, Shelter (building), shelters, as a Support (art), support for oil painting and for other ite ...

, MacConnel instead painted on fabric and bed sheets, which he would tear apart and sew back together again. It wasn't until MacConnel was in an exhibition in (Germany) that his art became recognized.
:"It wasn't really until a German collector who wrote a newsletter for German collectors saw the work in a show that I was in Germany and was overcome by it. He thought it was really brilliant for some reason. And that's when a contingent of Europeans really started looking at what we were trying to do. Particularly in my case, what I was trying to do. And found that it resonated in that area for them as a new avenue into the future, really, of what art making might be. So it was revolutionary in some ways in terms of, like, the status quo". ''Kim McConnel Gets His Dues,'' Interview by Maureen Kavanaugh on KPBS. Nov 4 2010
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Exhibitions

* ''Collection Applied Design'' in 1976 was MacConnel's first solo exhibition and was also his big break back in the states. A book, ''Collection Applied Design'', which he had found in

China Town Chinatown ( zh, t=唐人街) is the catch-all name for an ethnic enclave of Chinese people located outside Greater China, most often in an urban setting. Areas known as "Chinatown" exist throughout the world, including Europe, Asia, Africa, O ...

a few years before, inspired the exhibition. This book was pages of

clip art Clip art (also clipart, clip-art) is a type of graphic art. Pieces are pre-made images used to illustrate any medium. Today, clip art is used extensively and comes in many forms, both electronic and printed. However, most clip art today is creat ...

and logos put together randomly, in no certain order, and without an index, which inspired his series of works, ''"10 Items or Less"'' which he put into the show. * ''Age of Plastic'' was his next big exhibition which he added more of the sculpture aspect of his work. He had been collecting beach items that had washed up on shore for two decades and finally decided how he wanted to utilize them. He used them into a series of works titled ''"Trashy Beach Clowns"'' where he used his

found object A found object (a calque from the French ''objet trouvé''), or found art, is art created from undisguised, but often modified, items or products that are not normally considered materials from which art is made, often because they already hav ...

s and transformed them into

clown A clown is a person who performs physical comedy and arts in an Improvisational theatre#Comedy, open-ended fashion, typically while wearing distinct cosmetics, makeup or costume, costuming and reversing social norm, folkway-norms. The art of ...

figures. * Another well recognized series of works that is more recent is ''"Woman with Mirror"'' in 2007. In this series he went back to his original medium of painting with acrylics. Like

Picasso Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz y Picasso (25 October 1881 – 8 April 1973) was a Spanish painter, sculptor, printmaker, Ceramic art, ceramicist, and Scenic ...

had used

African art African art encompasses modern and historical paintings, sculptures, installations, and other visual cultures originating from indigenous African diaspora, African communities across the African continent. The definition may also include the ar ...

as the subject of his work and added backgrounds of pattern, he would look at those backgrounds and take out the subject matter. * ''Collection Applied Design,'' A Kim MacConnel Retrospective, which came out in 2010 and included the previous four decades of his work.

Personal life

MacConnel is married to artist

Jean Lowe Jean Lowe is a California-based painter and sculptor. She creates installations and sculptural works of enamel-painted papier-mâché. Education and career Lowe earned a B.A. from UC Berkeley in 1983. She earned her MFA from UC San Diego in 1988 ...

and lives in

Encinitas Encinitas (Spanish language, Spanish for "Small Oaks") is a beach city in the North County (San Diego area), North County area of San Diego County, California, United States. Located in Southern California, it is approximately north of San Di ...

Sources

{{DEFAULTSORT:Macconnel, Kim Living people 1946 births American artists