Kate Gilmore: In Your Way

Kate Gilmore ’97 is an artist who synthesizes multiple mediums including performance, video, sculpture, and painting. Kate Gilmore: In Your Way features ten works—nine performance-based videos and one live performance/sculptural installation that invites audience participation and that was commissioned by the Museum. Gilmore’s videos focus on herself or several women, wearing stereotypical feminine clothing and footwear while persistently performing difficult, labor-intensive tasks within self-constructed spaces.

According to exhibition catalogue contributor Amy Smith-Stewart, “The videos, performances, and sculptures of Kate Gilmore forge relational encounters that rearrange our thinking about structures of power. Gilmore’s protagonists, exclusively female, and within the videos, almost always herself, attack the ways in which we perceive gendered notions of strength, authority and control in our social arena.”

In her videos, Gilmore critiques and also inserts herself into male dominated movements such as Abstract Expressionism and Minimalism, exploring feminist themes and modern and contemporary art tropes, all the while exhibiting relentless determination. The spilling and splattering from her work are an ode to Abstract Expressionism or 1950s stripe paintings. Her works are mischievous and political, as well as humorous and critical of the heroic language and absence of women in these artistic movements. The physical situations and actions Gilmore creates for herself and her performers are metaphors for challenges women face culturally and socially.