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JILL DOWNEN
Speak Truth
bruno david gallery
Jill Downen Speak Truth
November 19, 2021 - March 6, 2022
Bruno David Gallery 7513 Forsyth Boulevard Saint Louis, Missouri 63105, U.S.A. info@brunodavidgallery.com www.brunodavidgallery.com
Owner/Director: Bruno L. David
This catalogue was published in conjunction with the exhibition “Jill Downen: Speak Truth” at Bruno David Gallery.
Editor: Bruno L. David Catalogue Designer: David Luo Designer Assistant: Claudia R. David Printed in USA
All works courtesy of Jill Downen and Bruno David Gallery Photographs by Bruno David Gallery and Richard Sprengeler
Cover image: (Anti) Plum Line, 2021 (detail)
First Edition
Copyright ©2022 Bruno David Gallery All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form without the written permission of Bruno David Gallery
CONTENTS
BLUE LINE IN SPACE: JILL DPOWNEN’S SPEAK TRUTH BY JENNY WU AFTERWORD BY BRUNO L. DAVID
CHECKLIST AND IMAGES OF THE EXHIBITION BIOGRAPHY
BLUE LINE IN SPACE: JILL DPOWNEN’S SPEAK TRUTH
BY JENNY WU A twenty-second audio file:“I always searched for the truth. I found half-truths, fake truths, hidden truths, provisional truths, invented truths, material truths, formal truths, analytical truths, synthetic truths…” 1
I lose the last three seconds of the sentence. The speaker’s winded speech gets garbled. The recording cuts off.
What I have before me that I want to call a transcript is a blue sound wave, a watercolor line rendered in the hand of Kansas City-based artist Jill Downen (b. 1967). Their exhibition Speak Truth at Bruno David Gallery (19 November 2021 – 5 March 2022) is the occasion for my encounter with a stranger’s voice. I can only guess what the speaker, Downen’s friend and fellow artist Flávio Cerqueira, says next. This triggers a vexation that is, I would argue, a perfect encapsulation of the way language functions in everyday conversation: as a process of grasping, guessing, retracing, anticipating, and assembling meaning out of sounds, silences, and breath. But the soft blue line before me represents a hypothetical language, a provisional panacea, a utopian proposition. It represents the language of truth/s.
Much of Downen’s past work has centered on the relationship between architecture and the human body. For instance, as part of their 2010 Guggenheim Fellowship, they constructed a site-specific installation at the Lu minary in St. Louis that served as a sanctuary for solitude and quiet. The space was compared to works by Fra Angelico and James Turrell for the way it evoked human spirituality and invited self-reflection.2 In an another instance, Downen manipulated the architectural components of the Contemporary Art Museum in St. Louis to make the building’s floors and walls swell like folds of flesh. In the past two years, it appears that Downen has turned their attention outward, toward language, intersubjectivity, and social trust. While remaining concerned with phenomenology, space, and light, Downen has devoted a significant portion of their recent practice to imagined space and realities conjured by voice.
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For Downen, their recent Speak Truth project (2020–) on display at Bruno David is an act of translation in a broad sense. They first invite participants to provide audio recordings of themselves “speaking truth,” whatever that might mean to the individual participant. They then paint the sound wave patterns each participant generates as a sinuous line on a long piece of paper. These painted lines are called “truth lines.” Downen mails the truth lines back to the participants, and through this process the artworks enter into a gift economy, and the participants—who now number over forty and represent nine countries and eight languages—are able to see their truths represented in a silent visual language. The tension of Speak Truth lies its unsettled relationship with several aspects of language and communication: questions of universality and specificity, preservation and distortion, accessibility and fugitivity all come to a head in this compendium of experimental intimacies.
Such questions race through my mind, and yet I am still here, affixed in time and space, with a stranger’s voice in my ear. Between breaths, I pick up fragments of background noise, what I interpret as birdsong and cars passing by, and I am convinced that the strangers who have participated in Downen’s project are gifting more than just their personal testimonies but also parcels of their geographies, their cities. The snippets of everyday goings-on in Brazil, Iran, Canada, France, Germany, Ghana, Lithuania, and elsewhere, together with the blue of Downen’s watercolor line, call to mind an image from poet and critic Maggie Nelson’s Bluets. From the window of her room in the Chelsea Hotel where she lies with her lover, the speaker describes a blue tarp flapping on another building’s roof.
“It was a smear of the quotidian,” Nelson writes, “a bright blue flake amidst all the dank providence. […] It was essentially our lives. It was shaking.” 3
Likewise, Downen’s blue artworks—whether they are books, scrolls, sculptures, or immersive installations—are rendered not in the blue of the sky but in that of polyethylene tarps and PVC pipes. In other words, Downen presents to us a human-made blue, a blue that symbolizes the world we have constructed, that is the consequence of our human actions, which are themselves consequences of our anxieties and ambitions. The color’s manifold cultural associations aside, blue is, for Downen, the color most closely associated with truth, the subject of the exhibition.
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Beyond the Speak Truth artifacts, the viewer encounters an immersive sculptural installation that lifts the “truth line” from the page and gives it a material body. Some of these three-dimensional forms hang from the ceiling in the center of the room. One such hanging tentacle, owing to its excess length, winds across the floor, tapering like the tail of a snake. Other more rigid forms lean against corners and walls. These sculptures are blue, though segments have been wrapped in white gauze, and I occasionally come upon a stripe of white paint or a spot of gold. Inside the stark white cube of the gallery, the sculptures seem to breathe. Their slack postures— the way they hang and lean—seem to be the very indicators of their organicity.
The word that comes to mind is preparation. The shades of blue in the bright white cube certainly suggest newness, finish. Yet the rough textures, the uneven coats of latex and plaster, suggest a process cut short, entropy settling in on that which never achieved its final form. The blue wires look as if they have been hung up to dry, the long poles leaning against the wall resemble implements waiting to be picked up and used. Each tangled cord insinuates the process and labor of its future unraveling and yet remains suspended, oscillating between states of growth and decay.
The unsettledness of the installation is, I believe, of a piece with that of the Speak Truth project. Like those first-person testimonies, the sculptures in the installation were once a collection of disparate objects that Downen has chosen to bathe in blue. Yet through the gaps in the latex coating of a work like (Anti) Plumb Line (2021), a blue knot that hangs by the entrance, one can see the specific identity of the blue PVC pipe asserting itself. This deconstructed quality contributes to the formal argument of this exhibition, which was conceptually organized around the patterns and ruptures present in the symbolically potent colors blue, gold, and white. The shattering of conventional binaries such as uniformity and difference emerges as another of the show’s guiding principles, just as the open-ended imperative to “speak truth” makes room for both abstract concepts shared across cultures—identity, family, and the importance of voice—and the nuances of each individual’s cadences and contexts.
Any examination of “truth” and what it means to “speak truth” is necessarily an excavation of truth’s limita tions: the helplessness of testimony in the face of systemic oppression, the instability of a single subjectivity within the affective soup of others’ competing worldviews. The vast expanses of white space on the pages of the Speak Truth books—and the white walls of the gallery space—render the quivering blue lines of truth ever
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thinner and stranger. At the same time, it is the overwhelming encroachment of falsity’s abyss that makes a blue mark in the void as necessary as breath itself.
1. Jill Downen, Speak Truth: Flávio Cerqueira, http://jilldownen.com/speak-truth-nov-21/.
2. Ivy Cooper, “Jill Downen,” Art in America, 23 November 2010, http://www.artinamericamagazine.com/reviews/jill-downen/.
3. Maggie Nelson, Bluets (Seattle and New York: Wave Books, 2009), 7.
Jenny Wu is a writer and an art historian. She received her BA from Emory University, an MFA in fiction writing from Washington University in St. Louis. She served as the writing program’s Senior Fiction Fellow before re ceiving an MA in art history, specializing in global contemporary art and performance. She is a fiction editor at The Spectacle and a visual arts editor at Remake. She has worked for organizations such as The Luminary Arts and the Pulitzer Arts Foundation and contributed to the Universities Art Association of Canada (UAAC) conference, the London Centre for Interdisciplinary Research, the Southeast College Art Conference, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and the Tin House Summer Workshop. Her short stories, literary reviews, scholarship, and art criticism have received generous support from the Rona Jaffe Foundation, Louis B. Sudler Prize in the Arts, and the Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry and appear in journals such as Asymptote, BOMB, Denver Quarterly, Harp & Altar, MARCH: a journal of art & strategy, Refract, The Literary Review, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. This text is one in a series of the gallery’s exhibitions written by fellow gallery artists and friends.
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AFTERWORDS
BY BRUNO DAVIDBruno David is pleased to present Speak Truth, an exhibition of new sculptures by Jill Downen. This is their sixth solo exhibition with the gallery. What does truth look like? Jill Downen’s new work engages global exchange by activating the complex ways we perceive objective and subjective truths. The exhibition invites visitors into a series of encounters with spoken word, text, and linear movements in space that twist, flex, tangle, and split into multiple pathways. The Speak Truth works range in scale and materiality, and include: handmade books, sculptural objects, installations, works on paper, plaster, concrete, steel, gold leaf, pyrite (fool’s gold), and lapis lazuli stone. The exhibition features audio recordings by international project participants that have been translated into visual forms; the artworks reveal patterns of meaning in value systems such as identity, family, and the importance of voice. The art responds to private and public space as it shifts scale from the intimate to the monumental. Downen’s Speak Truth series seeks to anchor, measure, and orient as communities collectively navigate a disinformation age.
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Jill Downen’s art practice is a focused investigation of the symbiotic relationship between sculpture, the human body and architecture. Her art envisions a place of interdependent relation between the human body and the built environment, where the exchanging forces and tensions of construction, deterioration, and restoration emerge as thematic possibilities. Downen believes that the body is the primary vehicle for understanding the world, and she offers viewers immersive sculptural environments that engage the senses and ways of knowing that are often private and experiential.
Jill Downen is the recipient of numerous awards including the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, Stone and DeGuire Contemporary Art Award, and Charlotte Street Foundation Visual Artists Award. Residencies include MASS MoCA, MacDowell Colony National Endowment for the Arts residency, Proyecto áce, and Cité International des Arts residency in Paris. Her work was recently featured in State of the Art 2020 at The Momentary/Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art and is currently exhibiting in the Terrain Biennial in Toronto, ON, Canada. She has created site specific installations for museums such as American University Museum in Washington DC, the Oklahoma City Museum of Art, and the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis Great Rivers Biennial and its 10th Anniversary exhibition, Place is the Space. Her art has been reviewed in publications including Art in America, Sculpture Magazine, Art Papers, The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, The New York Times and Bad at Sports. She holds a BFA from the Kansas City Art Institute and an MFA from Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts - Washington University in St. Louis. Jill Downen is an associate professor and Chair of sculpture at the Kansas City Art Institute. She lives and works in Kansas City, KS.
Support for the creation of significant new works of art has been the core to the mission and program of the Bruno David Gallery since its founding in 2005. I would like to express my sincere thanks to Jenny Wu for her thoughtful essay. I am deeply grateful to David Luo, who gave much time, talent, and expertise to the produc tion of this catalogue. Invaluable gallery staff support for the exhibition was provided by Bonnie Dana, Naomi Yu, Arthur Baue, Alex McLaughlin, Nina Huang, and Grace Ray.
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CHECKLIST & IMAGES OF THE EXHIBITION
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(ANTI) PLUMB LINE
2021 PVC, Latex 108 x 40 x 27 inches (274.3 x 101.6 x 68.6 cm) Editions of 3
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Line Books (Ann Rapstoff)
Watercolor on Paper
5 x 16 x 8 inches
(12.7 x 40.6 x 20.3 cm)
18 Truth
2021
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20
21
Truth Line Scroll
2021
Mixed Media, wood 190 x 24 x 30 inches (482.6 x 61 x 76.2 cm)
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24
25
Plumb Line
2020
Soild Brass, Japanese mason line 5 1/2 x 3 1/2 x 2 inches (14 x 8.9 x 5.1 cm) Edition of 6
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27
Les Briques Femelle
2021
Concrete, gold leaf, white gold leaf and mixed media 6 1/2 x 2 1/2 x 2 1/2 inches (16.5 x 6.4 x 6.4 cm)
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Truth is Golden 2021
Gold and fool’s gold (pyrite), glass, plexiglass case, shelf 10 x 9 1/2 x 9 inches (25.4 x 24.1 x 22.9 cm)
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If Truth were a Color
2021
Lapis Lazuli and powdered lapis stone, glass, plexiglass case, shelf 10 x 9 1/2 x 9 inches (25.4 x 24.1 x 22.9 cm)
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Untitled 27 (Here all is distance, there it was Breath series) 2019
Plaster, Basswood, pigment 10 x 8 x 1 3/4 inches (25.4 x 20.3 x 4.4 cm)
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Untitled 26 (Here all is distance, there it was Breath series)
2019
Plaster, Basswood, pigment
10 x 8 x 1 3/4 inches (25.4 x 20.3 x 4.4 cm)
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Untitled 5 (Here all is distance, there it was Breath series) 2019
Plaster, Basswood, pigment 10 x 8 x 1 3/4 inches (25.4 x 20.3 x 4.4 cm)
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Untitled 28 (Here all is distance, there it was Breath series)
2019
Plaster, Basswood, pigment
10 x 8 x 1 3/4 inches (25.4 x 20.3 x 4.4 cm)
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Untitled 32 (Here all is distance, there it was Breath series) 2019
Plaster, Basswood, pigment 10 x 8 x 1 3/4 inches (25.4 x 20.3 x 4.4 cm)
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Untitled I (Here all is distance, there it was Breath series)
2019 Plaster, pigment 24 x 18 x 1 3/4 inches (61 x 45.7 x 4.4 cm)
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Untitled II (Here all is distance, there it was Breath series) 2019 Plaster, pigment 24 x 18 x 1 3/4 inches (61 x 45.7 x 4.4 cm)
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Untitled III (Here all is distance, there it was Breath series)
2019 Plaster, pigment 24 x 18 x 1 3/4 inches (61 x 45.7 x 4.4 cm)
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JILL DOWNEN
Lives and works in Kansas City, Kansas
EDUCATION
2001 M.F.A., Washington University in St. Louis, St. Louis, MO
1989 B.F.A., Kansas City Art Institute, MO
SOLO EXHIBITIONS
2022 Mid America Arts Alliance, I Spoke Truth and Someone Listened, Kansas City, MO.
Bruno David Gallery, Speak Truth, St. Louis, MO. (catalogue)
2019 Bruno David Gallery, Here all is distance, there it was Breath, St. Louis, MO. (catalogue)
2016 Bruno David Gallery, As If You Are Here, St. Louis, MO. (catalogue)
2015 Studios Inc, Site Unseen: Architectural Installations, Kansas City, MO.
2014 Hown’s Den, Ceiling Scape, Kansas City, MO.
2013 Bruno David Gallery, Three-Dimensional Sketchbook, St. Louis, MO. (catalogue)
Herron Galleries, 3x3: Restoration, Indianapolis, IN Plug Projects, Three-Dimensional Sketchbook, Kansas City, MO.
2012 North Texas Gallery, Dust and Distance, U. of North Texas, Denton, TX. (catalogue with DVD)
Bruno David Gallery, Mid-Section, St. Louis, MO. (catalogue)
2011 Oklahoma City Museum of Art, Jill Downen: Counterparts, New Frontiers Series for Contemporary Art, Oklahoma City, OK. (catalogue)
2010 The Luminary, (dis) Mantle, St. Louis, MO.
2009 Bruno David Gallery, Hard Hat Optional, St. Louis, MO. (catalogue)
2008 Rosenberg Gallery, Drawing in Dialogue, (with Luce Irigaray), Hofstra University, Hempstead, NY. (in conjunction with the 3rd Annual Luce Irigaray Circle Conference)
Bruno David Gallery, Cornerstone, New Media Room, St. Louis, MO.
2007 Cité Internationale des Arts, Corps et Bâtiment á Paris, Paris, France.
Murray State University Gallery, In & Out of Space, (with Dean Kessmann), Murray, KY.
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2006 Bruno David Gallery, (dis)embody, St. Louis, MO. (catalogue)
Tarble Arts Center, Uneasy Opposition, Eastern Illinois University, Charleston, IL. (catalogue)
2004 Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, The Posture of Place, Great Rivers Biennial, St. Louis, MO. (catalogue)
2003 Ninth Street Gallery, Body/Building: Involuntary Anatomies, St. Louis, MO.
2002 A.R.C. Gallery, Rubber Wall, Frontspace Installation, Chicago, IL.
2001 Beelke Gallery, Anxious Architecture, Purdue University, Lafayette, IN. In-Form Gallery, MFA Thesis Exhibit, St. Louis, MO.
PUBLIC COMMISSIONS AND SITE SPECIFICS
2019 Architectural Folly from a Future Place, Swope Park, Kansas City, MO.
2014 Skeleton & Skin, Mitchell Museum at Cedarhurst Center for the Arts, Mt. Vernon, IL.
2010 Currents, collaborative with Act 3, interactive permanent installation for Center of Creative Arts, St. Louis, MO. (destroyed in 2018)
SELECTED GROUP EXHIBITIONS
2022 21 Years: 21 Artists, Curated by Sean FitzGibbons, Schmidt Art Center, Belleville, IL.
State of the Art: Record, LSU Museum of Art, Baton Rouge, LA. (traveling exhibition, The Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art/The Momentary) Among Friends, Bruno David Gallery, St. Louis, MO Fluid, Habitat Contemporary, Kansas City, MO (with Char Schwall)
2021 I Spoke Truth and Someone Listened, TERRAIN BIENNAL 2021, curated by Carrie Perreault, Artscape Weston Common, Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Bilingual: Abstract & Figurative, Bruno David Gallery, St. Louis, MO. re/collections, organized by Rae Koepselat, H&R Block ARTSPACE, Kansas City, MO. Blanche / Blanc, Bruno David Gallery, St. Louis, MO.
2020 State of the Arts 2020, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art and The Momentary, Bentonville, AR
OVERVIEW_2020, Bruno David Gallery, St. Louis, MO.
2019 MARKS, Bruno David Gallery, St. Louis, MO.
OVERVIEW_2019, Bruno David Gallery, St. Louis, MO.
2018 Small Worlds, Bruno David Gallery, St. Louis, MO.
Open Spaces KC, The Exhibition, curated by Dan Cameron, Kansas City, MO. Time, Space and Process, Bethel University Olson Gallery, St. Paul, MN. REenter, OVERVIEW_2019, Bruno David Gallery, St. Louis, MO.
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2018 A Periodic Table: Imagined Spaces, Carter Art Center, Kansas City, MO.
Flat Files, Digital files, Artspace, Kansas City, MO.
OVERVIEW_2018, Bruno David Gallery, St. Louis, MO.
Please Touch: Body Boundaries, curated by Ysabel Pinyol, Mana Contemporary, Jersey City, NJ.
Arte Laguna Prize International Exhibition, painting, Arsenal of Venice, Venice, Italy (catalogue)
2017 OVERVIEW_2017, Bruno David Gallery, St. Louis, MO.
Casting Shadows, Artspace, Kansas City, MO.
Underpass, Studios Inc, Kansas City, MO.
Artists for Truth Benefit Exhibition, Space Camp, Baltimore MD.
Pilferage, curator Jacob Low, Bruno David Gallery, St. Louis MO.
Attach Files, 50/50, Kansas City MO.
Cornerstone, Bruno David Gallery, St. Louis MO.
Spektrum, curator Robert Gann, Studios Inc, Kansas City MO.
Studios Inc 2017, artists in residence annual exhibition, Studios Inc, Kansas City MO.
2016 Dynamic, Steckline Gallery Newman University, Wichita, KS.
Ontology of Influence, Ronald Leax and Alumni, Des Lee Gallery, St. Louis, MO. (catalogue)
Kansas City Flatfiles, H&R Block Artspace, Kansas City, MO.
2015 Charlotte Street Foundation Visual Artist, H&R Block Artspace, Kansas City, MO. (catalogue)
The Center is a Moving Target: If You Live(d) There, curated by Erin Dziedzic, Kemper at the Crossroads, Kansas City, MO.
Recent Acquisitions, Oklahoma City Museum of Art, Oklahoma City, OK. AND/OR, Bruno David Gallery, St. Louis, MO. (catalogue)
Studios Inc 2015, resident exhibition, Kansas City, MO.
2014 OVERVIEW_2014, Bruno David Gallery, St. Louis, MO.
Sightlines, American University Museum at the Katzen Arts Center, Washington D.C. Resident Exhibition, Studios Inc, Kansas City, MO.
Kansas City Flatfile, H&R Block Artspace, Kansas City, MO.
2013 Place is the Space, Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis, MO. Artworks, Bruno David Gallery, St. Louis, MO. New Four, KCAI Faculty Exhibition, H&R BlockSpace, Kansas City, MO.
2012 BLUE-WHITE-RED, Bruno David Gallery, St. Louis, MO.
2011 Chain Letter, Shoshana Wayne Gallery, Santa Monica, CA.
Jim Schmidt Presents Abstraction, Philip Slein Gallery, St. Louis, MO.
Prints + Multiples, Bruno David Gallery, St. Louis, MO.
2010 Art in Architecture, The Center for Contemporary Art, jurors Michael Graves, James Christen Steward, Sassona Norton, Bedminster, NJ.
Over Paper, Bruno David Gallery, St. Louis, MO. (catalogue)
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2009 Monochrome, Manifest Creative Research Gallery, Cincinnati, OH.
Quad-State Biennial, Quincy Art Center, Best of Show, juror Jim Schmidt, Quincy, IL.
2008 Hybrida, works on paper, Bruno David Gallery, St. Louis, MO.
Overview_08, Bruno David Gallery, St. Louis, MO.
SLU Art Now, faculty exhibition, St. Louis University, St. Louis, MO.
2007 Paper Now, I-Space, curated by Chris Kahler, Chicago, IL.
Overview_07, Bruno David Gallery, St. Louis, MO.
Perspectives, Brooks Museum of Art, curated by Michael Rooks, Memphis, TN
Flat Files, Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, curated by Katie Holten, St. Louis, MO.
Auction Exhibition, Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, MO.
2006 Overview_06, Bruno David Gallery, St. Louis, MO.
Overflow, 1708 Gallery, 2-person show curated by Elizabeth Keller, Richmond, VA.
2005 Inaugural Exhibition, Bruno David Gallery, St. Louis, MO.
2004 Projects ‘04, Islip Art Museum Long Island Carriage House, East Islip, NY.
Danforth Scholars Show, Des Lee Gallery, St. Louis, MO.
Everything you wanted to know, Elliot Smith Gallery, St. Louis, MO.
Arts Desire Auction, Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, MO.
2003 Bi-national Art Exhibit, U.S. Embassy, curator Maria Velasco, Asuncion, Paraguay Corners, Museum of Contemporary Art, curator Erica France, Ft. Collins, CO.
Wear Structure, Open-End Gallery & Heaven Gallery, Chicago, IL.
2001 Heuristic Origins, Second Floor Contemporary, curator David Hall, Memphis, TN.
Exposure 4 The Spaces In-Between, Park Avenue Gallery, curator Terry Suhre, St. Louis, MO.
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BIBLIOGRAPHY
Jenny Yu “Blue Line in Space: Jill Downen’s Speak Truth” Catalogue essay, Bruno David Gallery Publication, October 2022. Eric Minh Swenson “Jill Downen: (Anti) Plumb Lines” EMS Legacy Films, 2022.
Maria Vasquez Boyd “Jill Downen & Char Schwall,” Interview, KKFI – 90.1 FM, Kansas City, MO.
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Angelica Zeller Michaelson “Casting For Meanings In Jill Downen’s ‘Architectural Folly from a Future Place,” Essay, Munich, Germany. 2020. “Cover & back-cover”, UNDER THE BRIDGE publication, Autumn 2020.
Lauren Haynes “State of the Art 2020” Catalogue exhibition, The Momentary and Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Alejo Benedetti Bentonville, AK. 2020.
Allison Glenn
Laura Spencer Interview about participation in the exhibition “State of the Art 2020” at the Crystal Bridges Museum and The Momentary, Bentonville, Arkansas. NPR-KCUR 89.3, 2020.
Ben Davis “State of the Art 2020 at The Momentary and Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art,” ARTNET News. 2020.
Laura Spencer “Kansas City’s Open Spaces Arts Festival Was Last Summer, But These 7 Pieces Are Still Up” Interview, KCUR 89.3/ NPR Radio, Kansas City, MO. 2020.
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José Faus “Notes,” Catalogue Poetry, Bruno David Gallery Publication, November 2019
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Neil Thrun, “The Center is a Moving Target”, KC Studio Magazine, October 19, 2015
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Dickson Beall “Body Buildings”, Documentary Film, (Joan Falk, Producer), 2010
“Counterparts”, Documentary Film, Oklahoma City Museum of Art, New Frontiers Series for Contemporary Art, June 2011
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Dickson Beall “Construction Zone”, West End Word, April 15-28, 2009, 11
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Alan Artner “Paper Now”, Chicago Tribune, September 21, 2007
Bill Griffin “Jill Downen,” Documentary Film, Illusion Junkie, September 2007
Jeffrey Hughes “Jill Downen”, Art Papers, July/August 2006, p. 70.
Natalie Kurz “Best in Show”, Alive Magazine St. Louis, September 2006, 63.
Melissa Merli “Sculptor explores physical connection between buildings & bodies”, News Gazette, Champaign-Urbana, IL, July 30, 2006, E6-E8.
Jason Coates “Body Talk”, Style Weekly, Richmond, VA. July 26, 2006, pp. 37-38.
Dickson Beall “Jill Downen at Bruno David Gallery”, Illusion Junkie, April 2006.
Jan Garden Castro “St. Louis, Three Rivers Biennial”, Sculpture, Jan/Feb 2005, p.70.
Kim Humphries “(dis)embody,” Catalogue essay, Bruno David Gallery Publication, April 2006
Jan Garden Castro “St. Louis, Three Rivers Biennial”, Sculpture, Jan/Feb 2005, p. 70.
Robert T. Herrera “Inaugural Exhibition,” Bruno David Gallery Video, St. Louis, November 2005
David Bonetti “Art in 2004”, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, January 02, 2005, p. G8 Helen A. Harrison “Projects ‘04”, The New York Times, September 26, 2004, L1, p. 11
Jeffrey Hughes “Jill Downen & The Posture of Place”, Washington University Artworks, vol 9, #2, Fall 04, cover story
David Bonetti “Installation Art is Contemporary”, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, August 1, 2004, p. F5.
Ivy Cooper “2004 Great Rivers Biennial Exhibition”, Riverfront Times, July 28, 2004, p. 42. Tim Woodcock “Off the Wall”, West End Word, July 21, 200407, cover & p. 10.
Michael Sampson “Cityscape”, live conversation, KWMU Radio - NPR, July 16, 2004
David Bonetti “Great Rivers...Flow”, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, July 11, 2004, p. F3.
Theresa Callahan “Danforth Scholars Show”, West End Word, January 21, 2004, pg. 12.
Angelica Zeller Michaelson, “Diversity…WU’s MFA show”, West End Word, May 10, 2001
Sarah Szczepanski “Artist’s exhibit focuses on Childhood memories”, Purdue Exponent, August 28, 2001
David Bonetti “Body/Building”, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, November 9, 2000, p. C7.
Tim Brouk “Anxious Architecture”, Lafayette Journal and Courier, August 19, 2001, p.E2.
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PUBLISHED WRITING
Downen, Jill Carmon Colangelo: Configured/Disfigured, catalogue essay, published by Bruno David Gallery, September 2006 Downen, Jill Transpolyblu: art gone digital challenges traditional space, art review published by West End Word, February 22-28, 2001
PUBLIC COLLECTIONS
Oklahoma City Museum of Art Mitchell Museum at Cedarhurst Center for the Arts Sprint Corporation
Southwest Illinois College
Emerson Electric, Corp. City of Kansas City Private Collections
PUBLIC LECTURES AND VISITING ARTIST
2022 Loughborough University, Sculpture Research Group, London, UK
2021 Parsons School of Design, visiting critic ‘Light Space’ final reviews, virtual, NY, NY Kansas University, “Speak Truth / Spotlight on Care” series, virtual, Lawrence, KS
2020 University of Waterloo, visiting critic for graduate MFA students, virtual, York, Ontario
2019 Bruno David Gallery, “Here all is Distance, There it was Breath”, St. Louis, MO.
2018 Bethel University, “Time Space Process”, St. Paul, MN.
21C Salon & Open Spaces; “A View From Home”, moderator Erin Dziedzic, Kansas City, MO.
2017 Bruno David Gallery, “Regarding Breath”, St. Louis MO.
2016 Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville, IL.
2015 KCAI, “Current Perspectives”, Kansas City MO. Studios Inc., Gallery Talk, Kansas City MO.
Nerman Museum, Gallery Talk, Overland Park, KS.
2014 American University, Visiting Artist, Washington D.C.
2013 H&R Block Space, “Inspiration”, panelist, Kansas City, MO.
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2013 Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, “Gold leaf workshop”, St. Louis, MO.
The Mitchell Museum at Cedarhurst, Public Lecture, Mt. Vernon, IL.
Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis Artist Roundtable: Place is the Space, St. Louis, MO.
La Esquina, “Making with Architecture”, panel discussion, Kansas City, MO.
Plug Projects, Gallery Talk, “Three-Dimensional Sketchbook, Kansas City, MO.
2012 Kansas City Art Institute, Kansas City, MO.
Southern Illinois University, lecture and critiques, Edwardsville, IL.
Bowling Green State University, “Architecture Lecture Series”, Bowling Green, OH.
Dallas Museum of Art, Center for Creative Connections workshop, Dallas, TX.
University of North Texas, Lecture/graduate critiques, Denton, TX.
2011 The Phillips Collection, “Conversations with Artists Series”, Washington D.C.
George Washington University, Graduate Critiques, Washington D.C.
American University, Graduate Critiques, Washington D.C.
Webster University, Lecture, St. Louis, MO.
The Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts, “Frames of Reference”, St. Louis, MO.
University of North Texas, Denton, TX.
University of Oklahoma, Lecture and Critiques, Norman, OK.
2010 St. Louis Art Museum, “An Artist’s Favorites”, Gallery Talk, St. Louis, MO.
2009 Western Michigan University, Lecture & Workshop, Kalamazoo, MI.
St. Louis Art Museum, “The Sculptural Object in Culture”, Gallery Talk, St. Louis, MO.
2008 University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Lecture, Champaign, IL.
University of Texas, Lecture, Austin, TX.
American University, Lecture, Washington D.C.
Forest City Gallery, Public Lecture, London, Ontario, Canada.
2007 University of Arizona, Lecture, Tucson, AZ.
University of Central Florida, Lecture, Orlando, FL.
Drake University, lecture, Des Moines, IA.
Washington University, “Gendered Expressions”, St. Louis, MO.
Krannert Art Museum, Public Lecture, Urbana-Champaign, IL.
2006 Virginia Commonwealth University, Lecture/Critiques, Richmond, VA.
University of Missouri St. Louis, Lecture, St. Louis, MO.
Eastern Illinois University, lecture/critiques, Charleston, IL.
2005 George Washington University, Lecture/Critiques, Washington, D.C.
Webster University, Lecture, St. Louis, MO.
2004 Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, Panelist, Public Discussion, St. Louis, MO.
2002 Memphis College of Art, Public Lecture/Critiques, Memphis, TN.
2001 Purdue University, Lecture/Critiques, Lafayette, IN.
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GRANDS – AWARDS - RESIDENCIES
2021 2022 Award for Distinction, Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts at Washington University in St. Louis.
2019 MASS MoCA, Assets4Artists Residency, North Adams, MA.
2018 Stone and DeGuire Contemporary Art Award, Washington University in St. Louis, St. Louis, MO.
KCAI faculty development grant
2017 Ragdale Foundation residency, Lake Forest, IL.
2016 Santo Foundation Grant, International, St. Louis, MO.
KCAI faculty development grant
ArtsKC, Inspiration Grant, Kansas City, MO.
2015 Charlotte Street Foundation Visual Artist Fellowship, Kansas City, MO.
KCAI faculty development grant, Kansas City, MO.
2013 Studios Inc Residency, Kansas City, MO.
KCAI faculty development grant, Kansas City, MO.
2010 John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, New York, NY.
2009 MacDowell Colony National Endowment for the Arts Fellow, Peterborough, NH.
Leon Levy Foundation Grant, MacDowell Colonists
John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Travel Grant, MacDowell Colony, Ragdale Foundation Residency, Lake Forest, IL.
Vermont Studio Center residency and artist’s grant, Johnson, VT.
2007 Cité Internationale des Arts, residency, Paris, France.
2006 Emerson Visiting Critics/Curators Series, Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis.
2002 Visits with Franklin Sirmans, Ingrid Schaffner, Shamim Momin, Thom Collins, James Elaine, Douglas Fogle, Sylvia Chivaratanond, Hamza Walker
2004 Great Rivers Biennial Grant, Gateway Foundation & Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, By Lisa Corrin, Debra Singer, and Hamza Walker
1999 Danforth Scholar Fellowship for Graduate Study, Washington University in St. Louis, St. Louis, MO.
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brunodavidgallery.com
brunodavidprojects.com
@bdavidgallery
#BrunoDavidGallery
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#SpeakTruth
#JennyWu
#GoSeeArt
#ArtExhibition
#ArtBook
#ArtCatalog instagram.com/brunodavidgallery/ facebook.com/bruno.david.gallery twitter.com/bdavidgallery goodartnews.com/
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ARTISTS
Sara Ghazi Asadollahi
Laura Beard
Heather Bennett Lisa K. Blatt Michael Byron Bunny Burson Judy Child
Carmon Colangelo Alex Couwenberg
Terry James Conrad Jill Downen
Yvette Drury Dubinsky
Damon Freed Douglass Freed Richard Hull
Adrian Gonzalez Kelley Johnson
Estate of Howard Jones Chris Kahler
Xizi Liu Bill Kohn (Estate)
Estate of Leslie Laskey Justin Henry Miller James Austin Murray Yvonne Osei Patricia Olynyk Gary Passanise Judy Pfaff
Estate of Robert Pettus
Charles P. Reay
Daniel Raedeke Tom Reed
Frank Schwaiger
Char Schwall Christina Shmigel
Thomas Sleet Buzz Spector Cindy Tower Mark Traver Charloes Turnell Monika Wulfers
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