Hard Leisure, solo exhibition, Katharen Wiese

University of New Haven, Seton Gallery, 3/16/26 to 4/10/26

Hard Leisure considered the difficulty and luxury of leisure through printmaking, painting and handmade paper. In the monumental painting, how to smile at the end of our world, Wiese contends with the idea of apocalypse and the subtle ways individuals are both implicated in and resisting environmental crises. The exhibition’s namesake work is a relief print of Nebraskan nail artist Imagine Uhlenbrock, whose representation is central to the show. 

This portrait is among a series, i made the cornrows: Portraits of Black Nebraskans which uses long form collaboration as a foundation for imagemaking. The relief print is layered over a collage with pages from the Negro Traveler’s Greenbook, kraft paper, and handmade paper elements denoting postage and digital messaging. The dissemination of the print itself becomes a kind of postcard, both nostalgic and confronting the enormous difficulty faced by African Americans historically as they tried to vacation in the United States.

Throughout the show, the use of both materials and motifs subtly nod to the idea of product movement: corrugated cardboard, corrugated cotton paper, kraft paper from cardboard boxes, and even brown paper bags. Repeated imagery of airplanes, postage and the sky move between both literal representation and symbolic form. Together, these works nod to the contribution of air travel and transportation to the realities of climate change. Trails of cotton fiber extend out of the silhouette of an airplane in the handmade paper work, parcel.  The work situates its subjects in transit, shipment, and exit: the artworks are composed of commodity culture, even as they insist on the reevaluation of humble materials. 

For Vida and Hard Leisure by Katharen Wiese

She wears a wide brimmed hat, eyes framed by an aureole of concentric lines

She is the center of a universe

Her copper skin the landscape

Green fabric rolling and unfolding like the plains

Elizabeth Catlett’s sharecropper in an invisible landscape and Imagine’s rooftop pool:

We rhyme

Decades later

across landscape and occupation

Big Mama was beautiful then

She was beautiful even with hollow cheeks

Even with thinning fabric on her skirt

What is black glamour

Where and how do we find it

Elizabeth knew glory is immaterial

It is a gaze

It is the broadness of her smile

The delight in her own self-expression

We were always 

All that

We hold all that

What they call dichotomy

Between glamour and labor

Between rest and self-determination

A porous fissure

A running stitch

Never broken, just on the other side