Artist Talk

Saturday, September 16th | 11am

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Join us for an enlightening discussion with textile artist Linda Jurkiewicz as she takes us on a journey through her installation, "WHO WILL HEAR MY PLEA?" allowing us to delve into her inspiration, concepts, and techniques.

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WHO WILL HEAR MY PLEA?

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The artist continues to explore the roles of women in her latest installation, “Hear My Plea,” as she works with images of saints, martyrs, and goddesses. Using the figure she delightfully calls BAH!, which first came to her in a dream, she explores the limitations, bravery, passion, zeal, and compassion of figures related to the Catholic church, paganism, and other cultures.

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Using imagery from the Renaissance and Middle Ages as a reference, a time when the general population could not read nor write, and utilized this imagery as their “lesson,” the artist observed only small differences between a woman’s life then and now.

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Whom might women call today?

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What messages might these images from the past offer to women today?

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Who might possibly hear today’s women in their plea for help?

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Bio

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Linda Jurkiewicz lives in Kansas City and began working with fiber in 2005. She credits her upbringing as a first-generation Ukrainian-Croatian for her “make-do” attitude and her delight in upcycling repurposed materials, especially “woman’s work” such as dish towels, household items, and clothing. Her consequential fiber work incorporates soft sculpture, wordplay, idiom, embroidery, wall hangings, plush form, sequential dioramas, and installations which delve into the cultural roles of women in America over the last century, roles that are changing and roles that she pushes viewers to reexamine, to trade nostalgia for empowerment.

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Jurkiewicz’s work has been shown in two solo shows in Kansas City galleries in 2022. Her work has been juried into numerous exhibitions locally. Nationally, her work has been included in Woman Made Gallery 24th International Exhibit, Chicago, Illinois (2023), Intersect Art Center Blue Hour, St. Louis, MO (2023), Amarillo Museum of Art Biennial-600: Textile/Fiber, Amarillo, Texas (2019), Raw – The Exhibition at Indiana University (2018), Sacred Threads in Herndon, VA (2017 and 2019), The Blue Show at the Core New Art Space (2017) and The Engaged Object at the Foothills Art Center (2016), both in Denver, Colorado, and Welcome to My World: Mental Health Awareness through Art at the MIRI Gallery (2016). Salt Lake City, Utah. Jurkiewicz is a member of the Kansas City Artists Coalition.