“Yvonne Petkus and Kaj Ard” Exhibition and Open Studio Event

La Macina di San Cresci Artist Residency, Greve in Chianti, Italy, April 20, 2024

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La Macina di San Cresci Artist Residency

Greve in Chianti, Italy, March – April 2024

“New Painting”

An online exhibition juried by New York-based curator Rachel Gugelberger through the Site:Brooklyn Gallery
Click here to view the exhibit and Rachel Gugelberger’s exhibition essay also titled New Painting

A short section from “Wall 3”, which includes my work:

A sense of both real and imaginary place, our changing relationship to the natural world, and the fragility of the human and nonhuman existence permeate the referential and representative works on view. Here are representations of visual “reality,” but less straightforward—more oblique, seen through gauzy hazes, overlaid with a multiplicity of forms, hidden messages and codes. The natural world touches the grotesque, while specific geographic locations—from upstate New York to the Sargasso Sea and to the wider universe, nature (from weather conditions to weeds breaking through the sidewalk)—are grounding forces, but also mystical channels that offer glimpses of other realms of consciousness and potentialities, suggesting alternate realities and ways of seeing. The human figure is often barely visible, a human touch receding in the pictorial field, guided of course, by the steady yet questioning hand of that classic, complex, and most resilient of visual arts practitioners: the painter.

“Existence”

Juried Group Exhibition, Danok, Inc. at Gallery Western, Los Angeles, California, March 2023

“Accumulations and Residues”

Exhibition and Artist Talk at the Hall Gallery, Millsaps College, Jackson, Mississippi, Fall 2022

“Referent: Cynosure in Psychogeography”

One-week Artist and Writing Residency Program through arts letters & numbers (out of Averill Park, New York) led by Andrew Helton and Ginger Teppner. Attended remotely July 2022.
Sequence of work conducted during the residency in response to the readings, discussions, and prompts:

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“11th Annual National Juried Exhibition”

A group exhibition juried by curator Sarah Magnetta who, after seeing a common thread between the selected works added the title Capturing the Present. Click here to read her full curator’s statement
Charles W. and Norma C. Carroll Gallery, Marshall University, Huntington, WV, January-February, 2022
Slippage, oil and encaustic on canvas, was awarded first place in this exhibition

“Painting 2011-2021”

An online exhibition juried by art critic Peter Frank through the Site:Brooklyn Gallery
Click here to view the exhibit and Peter Frank’s exhibition essay titled Painting is Undead

“(re)BUILDING”

A “post-pandemic” in-person group exhibition at Atlantic Gallery in Chelsea (New York) July 2021, juried by artist and author Jerry McLaughlin.
Click here to view the works from the exhibition; exhibition catalogue is available by clicking here

This past year art has been a refuge for many, a challenge for others, yet creativity prevails as we weather the ongoing storm. As artists we rely on numerous forces intrinsic to our creative process, navigating difficult and challenging periods, giving rise to beautiful and complex works. Now is the time to gather our resources and strength, and rebuild: our lives, our world, our art. Atlantic Gallery selected works from this past year (2020-21) that inspire, and embrace, the spirit of rebuilding, renewal and resiliency. Submitted artwork had to utilize wax, whether in the form of cold wax, encaustic, or both, in two-dimensional or three-dimensional works.

“A Persistent Body: The Work of Yvonne Petkus”

Feature article by Natalie Weis for Under Main
https://undermain.art/visual-arts/a-persistent-body-the-work-of-yvonne-petkus/

Panel Chair: Glimpses and Decoys: Painters Seeking Meaning through Interplay of Image and Material

SECAC Conference December 2020

“Manifesting Presence”

An exhibition of work by Kristina Arnold, Leslie Nichols, and Yvonne Petkus
Lexington Art League, Lexington, KY, September-November 2020

Artists Kristina Arnold, Leslie Nichols, and Yvonne Petkus come together in Manifesting Presence, an exhibition exploring the ways in which they as individual artists and as a collective hold space – and how biological, psychological, historical, and social environments shape this process. Arnold, Nichols, and Petkus began a group called the Critique Collective in Bowling Green, Kentucky six years ago. This will be their first time exhibiting as that collective. From large, wall-sized installations to intimately scaled works on paper, Manifesting Presence will include Arnold’s installations of cast glass, mixed fiber media, paper, and ink, Nichols’ text-based works created with tools including manual typewriters and a letterpress printing press, and Petkus’ sculptural paintings on plexiglass, mylar, panel, and canvas.

Yvonne Petkus named University Distinguished Professor by WKU

Click Here to hear Dr. Larry Snyder, Dean of Western Kentucky University's Potter College of Arts and Letters, mark the awarding of the designation of University Distinguished Professor to Yvonne Petkus (Professor of Art) at his college-wide fall convocation.

“Yvonne Petkus: New Work”

Moremen Gallery in Louisville, KY, Fall 2020

“Responding to Bosnia”

An exhibition of work by photojournalist James Kenney and artist Yvonne Petkus at the Downing Museum, January 28 - April 4, 2020

Responding to Bosnia is an exhibition of work by photojournalist James Kenney and artist Yvonne Petkus who conducted research together in Bosnia and Herzegovina through the 2017 Zuheir Sofia Endowed International Faculty Seminar (ZSEIFS) fellowship program. Both were deeply affected by this experience and have found that similar content and underlying meanings have emerged in the resulting work.

Exhibition is part of the WKU Office of International Program’s 'International Year of Revisited' 2019-2020 activities and is made possible by the Baker Arboretum and Downing Museum, the WKU Office of Global Learning and International Affairs, the WKU Department of Art, and the WKU School of Media.

“Bowling Green Art Museum Opens Exhibit Reflecting on Life and War in Bosnia”

NPR interview of Yvonne Petkus by WKU grad student and Brinkley Fellow Brandon Woempner
https://www.wkyufm.org/post/bowling-green-art-museum-opens-exhibit-reflecting-life-and-war-bosnia

“Responding To Bosnia: The Downing Museum to host a reception & gallery talk featuring the work of two WKU faculty members”

Blogpost for WKU Global Learning and Study Abroad by Natasha Breu
https://international.blog.wku.edu/2020/02/07/responding-to-bosnia-the-downing-museum-to-host-a-reception-gallery-talk-featuring-the-work-of-two-wku-faculty-members/

“Ever-Present: Yvonne Petkus at Moremen Moloney”

A recent review by Hunter Kissel of the exhibition Witness: Bosnian-Influenced Paintings
https://undermain.art/visual-arts/ever-present-yvonne-petkus-at-moremen-moloney/

“Witness” Bosnian-Influenced Paintings”

An exhibition of recent work by Yvonne Petkus at Moremen/Moloney Contemporary Gallery, April 13 – May 19, 2018

"The work in Witness: Bosnian-Influenced Paintings comes from a fellowship that took me to Bosnia and Herzegovina in May 2017. This experience, which included three months of study followed by in-country research and exploration, was intense, beautiful, emotional, at some times difficult, and at all times inspiring. Working from sources gathered, each painting acts as a meditation, a grasping – a search for meanings that build physically and cognitively. By exploring ideas of struggle and survival, of vulnerability and the stubbornness necessary to persist, the work is intended as a mechanism to address the larger, most difficult, and most human of concerns that live with us just under the skin."

Frist Center for the Visual Arts Workshop

January 14, 2016

Absence and Presence: Using Drawing to Process Artistic Influence

A three-day workshop led by artist and professor Yvonne Petkus in conjunction with and in response to two exhibitions at the Frist Center for the Visual Arts (Nashville, TN): Michelangelo: Sacred and Profane, Masterpiece Drawings from the Casa Buonarroti and Phantom Bodies: The Human Aura in Art (an exhibition of contemporary works that attempt to find the "presence in absence" through a range of visual and physical means). Workshop organized by Associate Educator for Community Engagement at the Frist, Rosemary Brunton. November 7, 14, and 21, 2015