The Kentucky Museum of Art and Craft is pleased to announce that Gail M. Brown, Curator of Contemporary Crafts, of Philadelphia will curate the blockbuster show entitled Life INsight: The Human Experience. The exhibition, featuring nearly 100 artists from across the country, will be on display at the Kentucky Museum of Art and Craft from July 8th through November 4th, with an opening reception on Friday, July 7th from 5-9pm.

Gail M. Brown is an Independent Curator whose focus is to enhance visibility and education about contemporary craft in the larger visual arts community. She trained as a print maker at the Philadelphia College of Art, and she has been watching the contemporary crafts movement since the early 1970's. She curates focused exhibitions which share the exceptional work of mature and mid-career artists and introduce younger makers. She also lectures and writes on craft and professional practices for emerging artists. Her impressive resume includes exhibitions curated for NCECA in Baltimore, MD; the Brookfield Craft Center in Brookfield, CT; the Folk Art Center of the SHCG in Ashville, NC; and U Mass Dartmouth in New Bedford, MA. In addition, she has curated two shows of British jewelry which traveled to Boston, New York City, Chicago (SOFA), and St. Louis. Most recently, Gail curated The Edges of Grace: Provocative, Uncommon Craft for the Fuller Craft Museum in Brockton, MA.

Dave Caudill, Chairperson of the Curatorial Committee of KMAC says, "We brought Gail in to create an innovative exhibition that would engage people from many perspectives. She is attracted to works that have strong groundings in material, spirit and intellect. Catalogs and reviews from her shows told the Curatorial Committee that we found the right person."

Life Insight: The Human Experience will showcase craft objects that are inspired by the personal passages experienced in life. The show will examine what it is like to live, work, and die in contemporary society – from the vantage point of the contemporary craft artists. The pieces displayed will address aspects of the human experience in the context of physical, social, cultural and political matters, as well as the more personal subjects of birth, childhood, relationships, life choices and death. It will include ceramic sculpture, jewelry, metalwork, glass sculpture, fiber, studio furniture and mixed media forms. This is an invitational exhibition of exceptional work by artists from across the country whose unique art forms of diverse kind and scale explore aspects of being human.

"Call it a patchwork quilt. Call it a burgoo. Our community is a mix of the broadest range of human experience, and we wanted to create an exhibition that reaches out to all of it," explains Caudill. "Life INsight was developed by Gail M. Brown to provide a host of unique views of our collective drama."

Brown states, "The artists, each in their own clearly articulated visual vocabularies, acknowledge and celebrate our human struggles and triumphs, our challenges and strengths, our collective spirit and our own potential individuality."

About the Kentucky Museum of Art and Craft

The Kentucky Museum of Art and Craft is a nonprofit organization founded in 1981. Its mission is to promote the art and craft heritage of Kentucky. The Museum is supported in part by the Fund for the Arts and the Kentucky Arts Council, a state agency in the Commerce Cabinet, that provides operational support funding for KMAC with state tax dollars and federal funding from the National Endowment for the Arts, which believes that a great nation deserves great art. It is open Monday through Friday, 10:00 a.m. - 5:00 p.m., Saturday 11:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m., or by appointment. Admission is free. For more information, please call 502.589.0102 or log on to www.KentuckyArts.org.