About the Artist

Biography

Carolyn Kallenborn works with fabric and metal to create flowing garments and sculptural pieces. She shows her award-winning, hand painted garments and sculptures in galleries and exhibitions both nationally and internationally. Her work has been shown in Beijing , China ; Cheong-ju , Korea ; the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art in Arizona ; Fort Wayne Museum of Art in Indiana ; and other shows and galleries in St. Louis , Chicago , Atlanta and Cambridge , Mass. In addition, her work has been featured in such magazines as Fiberarts, Surface Design Journal and Shuttle Spindle and Dyepot.  She received her BA and MFA in Textile Arts from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Kallenborn taught textiles and design at the University of Wisconsin-Madison before jointing the faculty at Kansas City Art Institute.

Carolyn is an Assistant Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the Design Studies Department. She was an assistant professor in the Fiber Department at the Kansas City Art Institute from 2001 - 2007.  Carolyn currently serves as the Coordinator for “Off The Grid” the 2009 Surface Design Association international textile conference. She was  Conference Coordinator for “Uncovering the Surface” , SDA’s 2005 conference and was coordinator and juror for two major exhibitions for the SDA’s 2003 conference.

Carolyn co-leads study abroad tours to Mexico with cultural anthropologist, Richard Anderson.  

For a PDF of a current resume Click Here

Artist Statement All of my work, whether it is a garment, a sculptural piece, or an installation, is about transformation. Although garments are something we often take for granted we can change how we feel or how others respond to us by what we have on.  Because they are so personal and intimate, garments have great potential for artistic sculptural expression, individual and ritual transformation...... To read the full artist statement click here

Magic Realism: The Work of Carolyn Kallenborn 

by Michele Fricke

As published in the Surface Design Journal, Summer 2005

You can learn a lot about a person by asking what she reads. Carolyn Kallenborn prefers the genre of literature described as magic realism—stories in which situations are real enough to be familiar, but completely extraordinary things occur.  It’s an issue of being both real and unreal at the same time—the impossible becomes possible and even ordinary.  For her, this provides a shift out of her usual way of thinking and into a world more poetic than mundane. Magic realism is also an apt metaphor for the way in which she approaches materials and, by extension, her art.....

To read the full article click here

More Articles - reviews and pictured works:

Deseos review: The Pitch October 2007

http://www.pitch.com/2007-10-18/culture/art-exhibitions/full

FiberArts November 2007

http://69.36.170.218/PDFs/FiberartsReview.pdf