An interview by Melissa C. Hilborn, curator and Josh Ryder, curator arthabens @ mail. com
Hello Beth and welcome to LandEscape: we would start this interview with a couple of questions about your multifaceted background. You have a solid formal training and after having degreed from the Boston Museum School, you nurtured your education with a master’ s degree with a focus on critical pedagogy and art education from the Harvard Graduate School of Education and a Ph. D. in Education from the University of Colorado at Boulder: how do these experience influence the way you currently conceive and produce your works? And in particular, how does your cultural substratum inform the way you relate yourself to art making?
The social psychologist, Carol Gilligan, insists that we not only listen to what someone is saying, but understand who is speaking— in whose voice, in what body, from what time period and vantage point. With that in mind, I’ ll share a little bit of information about me, because the circumstances of my life have shaped( and continue to shape) who I am. I was born in Greenwich Village in the mid- 1960s— a time of great tumult but also of great hope and possibility for the United States. Activism is part of me, and has been since I first absorbed the consciousness of my era. It has taken different forms— as a frontline activist, as a researcher tracking the far right, as an educator and as an artist.
My practice is wide-reaching and brings together a material studio practice rooted in research. This practice is informed by multiple traditions of faith— including my own Jewish culture— art theory and a belief in the role of art to transform individuals and communities. It is important to keep in mind
Francine Gourguechon
that I make up my own rituals and do not in any way intend to represent a specific religious tradition.
That said, my own cultural roots inform my practice, even if I have not always been conscious of this. A few years ago, the art critic Doris Bittar wrote about my work. She stated that:
Beth Krensky metaphorically travels to
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