Artspeak Radio with Elizabeth Kirsch & Christopher Leitch

This week is a rebroadcast of Artspeak Radio from August 16th.

Producer/host Maria Vasquez Boyd welcomes the return of art historian/writer/curator Elizabeth Kirsch and artist/activist Christopher Leitch.

ELIZABETH KIRSCH is an art historian, curator, and writer who has curated over 100 exhibitions of contemporary art, American Indian art and photography, locally and across the country. She writes frequently for national and local arts publications.

CHRISTOPHER LEITCH- I am a visual artist working with unpredictable methods and various media. The content and images of my works are determined by chance occurrences and random processes, and I never know what anything’s going to look like. This uncertainty is liberating and invigorating.

I live and work near Kansas City, Missouri. My works have been widely exhibited and toured: “Explicit Content” with the cu46 project; “Lost Words” at Northwind Art, Port Townsend, WA; “Ink & Clay 45” at the Kellog University Art Gallery, California Polytechnic Pomona; “Fiber as Metaphor” at Gallery Fritz, Santa Fe; “word” at the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art; “True Stories” at Johnson County Community College Gallery of Art; “Men of the Cloth”, curated by poet Stephen Beal at the Loveland Museum in Loveland, Colorado (with catalogue); the Boston Society for Arts and Crafts; the Center for Craft, Creativity & Design, Asheville, North Carolina; Plymouth State College, NH; the Kansas City Jewish Museum; the Leedy-Voulkos Art Center; McAlester College Gallery of Art; Jan Weiner Gallery; and many others. I have designed costumes for private collections and public productions including The Paul Mesner Puppets’ presentations of Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Mikado and Mark Twain’s very naughty 1601. Hear me talk about my work on the radio here and here.

Publications featuring reviews and discussions of my work include: The Hand magazine, issue #25; Ley Lines, H. L. Hix, curator, Wilfrid Laurier University Press, Canada; Drawing from Life, Jennifer New, ed. The Princeton Architectural Press; New Art Examiner; Art in America; Fashion Theory; American Craft; the International Textile Design Directory. I have written for ArtPapers Atlanta, New Art Examiner and Ceramics: Art and Perception.

I was lead author of “LGBTQ Welcoming Guidelines for Museums: developing a resource for the museum field” in Museums and Social Issues, and a contributing author with Renae Youngs to companion article“Diversity in Museum Hiring” Museum Magazine. I have presented papers for the American Alliance of Museums, Alliance of Midwest Museums, the Hall Center for the Humanities and the Canadian Museums Association.

I served as Assistant Dean at Kansas City Art Institute, as a consulting curator with the Center for Creative Studies, University of Missouri-Kansas City, and as director of Kansas City Museum. I have been a visiting lecturer and instructor at many schools across the US.

I earned an MA in Visual Arts from Goddard College in Vermont and my BFA from Kansas City Art Institute. I attended the University of Oklahoma for three years.
www.christopherleitchstudio.net


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