Dec. 29, 2021 GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. – A Grand Rapids Community College student is sharing what she learned during a prestigious summer fellowship through an exhibit in the Paul Collins Art Gallery.
Through the Gordon Art Fellowship, Kristina Katerberg spent two months studying various aspects of nature at the Pierce Cedar Creek Institute, a nature and environmental education center and biological field station in Hastings.
The fellowship is intended to bring together a love of nature and art through funding a student-mentor team’s work in creating a two-dimensional visual arts project.
“The fellowship is open to all the schools around the state,” said GRCC professor Filippo Tagliati, who served as the project’s mentor. “This speaks loudly about Kristina’s achievement since she was competing against well-established art programs from four-year institutions.”
Katerberg was inspired to study the changes in nature during the COVID-19 shutdown.
“In the absence of people, I found that I could experience the world in a way that I had not before,” she said in a report to the institute.
Katerberg worked with still photography, video and sound. The results can be seen in the exhibit.
“I typically work in more controlled environments, so the notion of letting that go was concerning, but I kept coming back to the idea that nature has learned how to adapt to all kinds of upheaval, loss and uncertainty,” she said in her report. “After more than a year of navigating the tensions and unknowns of pandemic life, I was ready for a different kind of teacher.”
The Paul Collins Art Gallery is located on the fourth floor of Raleigh J. Finkelstein Hall, 143 Bostwick Ave. NE. The gallery reopens on Jan. 10 and Katerberg’s exhibit runs through Jan. 21. The gallery’s hours are 10:30 a.m. to 7 p.m. Mondays through Thursdays.