Kulvinder Kaur Dhew

Sugar Maples Speaker Series @ the Mountain Top Library

Date & Time: Friday, July 8, 2022 @ 7:00 pm
Location: Mountain Top Library, 6093 Main Street, Tannersville, NY 12485

FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC

Artist and Director of Sugar Maples Center For Creative Arts, Kulvinder Kaur Dhew will be presenting her work as part of a collaboration between the Speaker Series at Sugar Maples and the Artist Lecture Series at the Mountain Top Library. All are welcome.

The Speaker Series at Sugar Maples Center For Creative Arts at the Catskill Mountain Foundation provides the highest quality lecture experiences for the enrichment of the community in the Catskill region. Speakers represent a wide variety of cultural subjects from the visual arts, writing, poetry, architecture, and the environment. They are chosen based on their extraordinary achievements and unique expertise in their fields of endeavor.

Our goal is to bring together bright minds to give talks that are idea-focused, and on a wide range of subjects, to foster learning, inspiration, and wonder and provoke meaningful conversations that matter.

Kulvinder Kaur Dhew was born and raised in England. She is the Director of Sugar Maples Center For Creative Arts in New York.  Kulvinder received an MFA in Painting from The Royal College of Art during which time she was awarded the RCA Study Grant at Ar.CO in Lisbon, Portugal. Since then, She has received numerous residency awards, most recently at The Vermont Studio Center.

A recipient of the prestigious Delfina Fellowship in London, Kulvinder produced large-scale works subsequently collected by MTV Europe, Kazuo Ishiguro, The UK Department of Education and Science, and others. While Head of Painting at The School of Art in Dunedin, New Zealand she began to take interest in wilderness issues and the then early alarm bells regarding climate change. Later, while living and teaching at Universiti Malaysia Sarawak on the Island of Borneo, she undertook a body of works exploring censorship related to the largest forest fires recorded at the time. Kulvinder continues to explore environmental and cultural themes.

Currently using charcoal and paper to explore notions of witness and melancholia, as an artist, Kulvinder is drawn to examining near-to-almost-epic events from an emotive, reflective point of view, rather than a simply descriptive one.  Interested in the distance between landscape, photograph, drawing and response, she wants to engage the viewer through memories of their own into or out of the metaphorical storm. The concept in this case, is utilized for any number of contemporary concerns. Kulvinder is the recipient of a 2022 New Jersey Artist Fellowship Award.