Kim Carlino’s work will be on display at the Westfield Athenaeum throuhg May 3.
Photo credit: Kim Carlino
WESTFIELD — The Westfield Athenaeum is hosting an exhibit of the paintings of local artist Kim Carlino. The exhibit opened on March 10 and will run through May 3 inside the building’s gallery space.
Carlino is from Easthampton and has grown into one of the most dynamic artists working in the region based on the corners of the world she has been able to showcase work. She received her bachelor of fine arts degree from the University of Massachusetts in 2011 and over the last decade has exhibited nationally and internationally, including shows at the University Museum of Contemporary Art in Amherst, Site Brooklyn Gallery, Alfa Gallery in Miami, and was a UAE sponsored artist for the 2024 Ras Al Khaimah Art Festival.
Carlino has been creating public art since 2014 and has completed numerous mural commissions, including works in Marshalltown, Iowa, Springfield, Colorado Springs, the New York City Department of Transportation, the Isenberg Project in Boston, a seven-block public art project commissioned by the Garment District Alliance in NYC, and a mural for Google HQ in Cambridge.
“My work is based in eco-geometric abstraction exploring themes of place, poetics and experience,” said Carlino. “Abstraction for me is a tool to synthesize my daily experiences into visual renderings of relationships of color and form as I explore simultaneously my inner landscape in relation to my exterior one.”
The opening reception for the exhibit will take place on Thursday, March 13, from 6 to 8 p.m. The exhibit and reception are open to the public and all are encouraged to come meet the artist and view the showcase.
The Westfield Athenaeum Art Gallery is open Monday through Thursday from 9 a.m. to 8 p.m., and on Friday and Saturday from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. The paintings featured in the exhibit are for sale, and the proceeds benefit the artist and serve as a fundraiser for the athenaeum.
“Kim is an artist working in Easthampton and she’s been receiving a lot of recognition all over the region and other areas of the country,” Westfield Athenaeum Executive Director Guy McLain told Reminder Publishing. “I had seen her work in various exhibits in Easthampton and was really impressed with her work and thought she’d be really great for a show here.”
McLain said Carlino’s work is very impressive as they are often large, colorful paintings that combine both geometric and organic elements into the work, utilizing an abstract vocabulary to express feelings and ideas about the world around us.
“I look for ways to evoke the world around me in purely sensorial ways with no direct translation of these forms, from the movement of the wind across a field to the feeling of the meandering path across a hillside. These sensations feel familiar yet unknowable as they rest edge to edge in jarring closeness and connection,” said Carlino. “My visual vocabulary is filled with juxtapositions of disparate color relationships, basic, primal forms such as hexagons, squares and circles, repeating optical motifs and repetitive linear mark marking that acts as a metronome capturing the passing of time.”
For more information on the upcoming exhibit, visit westath.org.
McLain said the upcoming exhibit fits into the goals of the athenaeum in growing its offerings in the arts space while also utilizing its space to showcase local artists leading the local scene in today’s arts.
“We’re trying to bring in important, regional artists who are doing cutting edge work today and Kim is certainly an example of that. It fits in with a program that the athenaeum is trying to make a permanent feature of what we do here,” McLain said. “We have a wonderful gallery space here and my feeling is we want to utilize this gallery space. Artists are always looking for places to exhibit their work. We’re very fortunate in Western Mass. that there are so many interesting artists working out there. So, we look at this as an opportunity to both encourage and help these artists to find a good exhibit space, but also to bring regional artists who [are] doing cutting-edge work today, to the community. There’s not too many places for people to go to see contemporary art so we feel like that’s something we can provide here.”
