Empathy: A Creative Act - Panel Discussion

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Tiko Kerr, "Year of Kindness / December,"

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EMPATHY: A CREATIVE ACT  Bringing together artists from a range of mediums including painting, collage, sculpture, photography, and performance, the panel will explore how empathy can function as a methodology in a wide range of artistic practices. It also sets out to discover how conceptual practices can serve as facilitators of empathy, and how empathy in turn can offer humanity and dimension to the theoretical frameworks that artists employ.

Karleen Gardner, Director of Learning Innovation at the Minneapolis Institute of Art (MIA) and Project Director of their newly established Centre: for Empathy and the Visual Arts, will moderate the discussion with artist panelists Tiko Kerr, Zoe Kreye and Birthe Pionek.

Questions to be considered:  How can conceptual art be a facilitator of empathy, be it through interactions it promotes, or escapes it offers?  How can empathy function as a methodology in different types and styles of fine art making? Can the subject matter encourage empathy, and illuminate a facet of humanity the viewer wasn’t aware of and creates an environment that enables contemplation thereof?

With the help of a $750,000 grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, MIA is taking a leading role in collaborating with museum colleagues as well as researchers, scholars, content experts, and other influencers to explore practices for fostering empathy and global awareness through the power of art and to share these findings with the field.

“In our increasingly divisive world, polarized by issues regarding politics, racial inequities, marriage equality, global warming, income disparities, and immigration policies, it becomes clear that our failures to understand other people’s feelings are exacerbating prejudice, conflict, and inequality. If we wish to develop not only a more equal society but a happier and more creative one, we will need to look outside ourselves and attempt to identify with the experiences of others.  Empathy has the power to transform relationships, from the personal to the political, and create fundamental social change.” - Karleen Gardner

Karleen Gardner (Moderator)

Karleen Gardner, Director of Learning Innovation at the Minneapolis Institute of Art (MIA), leads initiatives and experiments in learning and interpretation in the museum and community. Gardner serves on MIA’s leadership team and collaborates to develop and implement institutional strategies and impactful community-focused initiatives.

She oversees programs in Multi-Generational Learning, Interpretation and Participatory Experiences, and School and Teacher Programs that foster critical and creative thinking skills and global competence. With a visitor-centered emphasis, she works with cross-functional teams to create accessible and relevant programs, in-gallery content, and engaging experiences both onsite and offsite for people of all ages and abilities.

Tiko Kerr (Panelist)

In Canadian visual artist Tiko Kerr’s 30 year practice, his interest has been primarily in perception and the emotive response that the image can actuate.  Kerr’s focus is chiefly in painting, drawing, paper collage, print-making and assemblage, although he finds teaching, lecturing and social advocacy enormously rewarding as well.

Kerr’s exhibition of paintings and paper collage is on currently at The Gordon Smith Gallery of Canadian Art and he is in mid process of executing a 91 foot long outdoor mural which has been commissioned by the BC Children’s Hospital.

Zoe Kreye (Panelist)

Zoe Kreye creates interdisciplinary art projects that explore transformation, embodiment and collective experience. Working in the realms of sculpture, performance, dance, drawing and somatics her projects take shape as installations, workshops, rituals and journeys. Materially she works close to the body using clay, cloth, foam and gestural lines. She create artworks through transcendent experiences, then invites publics and performers into the installations to embody, disrupt and explore the transformative capacity of sensation, narrative and ritual. She holds an MFA in Public Art and Social Practice from the Bauhaus University Weimar, BFA in Sculpture from Concordia University Montreal. She co-founded the Berlin artist collective Process Institute and is currently based in Vancouver and teaches studio and Social Practice at Emily Carr University for Art & Design.

Birthe Piontek (Panelist)

Born and raised in Germany, Birthe moved to Canada in 2005 after receiving her MFA from the University of Essen in Communication Design and Photography. Birthe’s art practice explores the relationship between memory and identity, with a special interest in the topic of female identity and its representation in our society. Her main focus is photography but she also utilizes other art forms such as installation, sculpture and collage to investigate to what degree our complex identities can be visualized. Birthe’s project The Idea of North won the Critical Mass Book Award 2009, and was published as a monograph in 2011. Her most recent work, Abendlied (Engl. Evening Song), received the Edward Burtynsky Grant in 2018 and was published in April 2019. Birthe is an Assistant Professor in Photography at Emily Carr University of Art & Design and is a member of the artist collective Piece of Cake Project.