Collection: Welcome Home

Interact is pleased to present Welcome Home: 18 Influential Voices from the Interact Studio, an exhibition that features a few of the many artists who have helped to shape our creative legacy. Coinciding with Interact's 30th anniversary, Welcome Home highlights six alumni alongside twelve current artists with the longest running tenures, representing a collective 370 years of artistic practice.

To be an Interact artist is to be a member of the studio: a shared, and often collaborative space, where the only prerequisite is the desire to be a professional artist. From the beginning, Interact was decidedly not an academic or a therapeutic organization. Instead, it was conceived of by artists, for artists, as an invitation: Welcome. What do you want to make today? This question, and its spirit of inclusivity and open-endedness, remains central to Interact's mission.

Over the years, studio members have taken this prompt and run with it, each independently pursuing their interests with a singular sense of direction, and yet, there is magic in sharing space. When one is sifting through the archives, evidence of good company abounds: there is the odd inside joke scrawled in the margins of a drawing; the photo of a studio mate, printed out as a reference image for a piece; the handwritten list of colors that Andie Kiley sang while she painted.

Among other things, Welcome Home offers moments of alignment across practices, media, and decades. Throughout the exhibition, common interests emerge: Janice Essick and Bill Crane cultivate kinship through portraiture. Chris Mason and Lucy Picasso engage fame and pop culture. Evita Newman and Laurie M. dedicate years to ecology. Matt Zimdars and David Wright find endless inspiration in placemaking, whether through tracking severe weather or describing the destinations of their dreams.

These eighteen artists helped cultivate a studio. Their work speaks to the potential of sharing creative space and time – a tradition in which so many other artists throughout art history have found meaning and purpose. In an age of heightened isolation and intolerance, that initial invitation, made thirty years ago, remains as radical as ever.

EXHIBITING ARTISTS

David Bauman, Bill Borden, Bill Crane, Janice Essick, Ingrid Hansen, Andie Kiley, Laurie M., Chris Mason, Evita Newman, Lucy Picasso, Rosalie Radford, Andy Seymour, Eric Sherarts, Tim Traver, Bob Williams, David Wright, Matt Zimdars.