Anya Kivarkis - Sienna Patti - Contemporary Studio Artists

Anya Kivarkis is currently Assistant Professor and Area Head of Jewelry and Metalsmithing at the University of Oregon in Eugene. She received a BFA in Jewelry & Metalsmithing from the University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana, and an MFA from the State University of New York in New Paltz in 2004. In 2007, she was the recipient of the Sienna Gallery Emerging Artist Award, and presented the solo exhibition titled, ‘Blind Spot’. Recent exhibitions include The Decorative Impulse at the Villa Terrace Museum in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, L’education Sentimentale at the Solidor Art Space in Cagnes sur Mer, France, Metalsmith Magazine’s Exhibition in Print, ‘Neo-Palatial: Objects of Virtue and Vice’, and “COLLECT’ at Saatchi Gallery in London. She was a recipient of the 2008 Oregon Arts Commission Individual Artists Fellowship, and the 2007 Rotasa Foundation grant to support the publication of ‘The Thinking Body’, an exhibition co-curated with Kate Wagle. Her work is included in collections such as the Tacoma Art Museum, the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art, The Rotasa Foundation, and the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art.

The social implications of visual and material culture deeply interest me. I am invested in the fields of craft and art because as material culture, they suggest cultural histories, beliefs, values, and ideas that may contradict or inform written history. I believe in studio-based practices because they enable artists to interrogate ideas in ways that are researched and critical, yet speculative and open to a range of often unexpected outcomes. My own studio practice is in many ways discipline specific, and is rooted in an examination of jewelry and luxury goods as its subject. I am interested in the possibilities of working within the conditions that frame the discipline of Jewelry & Metalsmithing, and in mining the history, objects and subjects embedded in the field as content. What interests me about working within these limitations are the possibilities for reconsidering ideas within the field in an expanded way. While my subject is discipline specific, my research is a synthesis of ideas from a range of disparate disciplinary inquiries, enabling me to consider specific ideas from an expansive vantage point.