Artist Statement
Kim Abeles is an artist who crosses disciplines and media to explore and map the urban environment and chronicle broad social issues. The Smog Collector series brought her work to national and international attention in the art world, and mainstream sources such as Newsweek and Dan Rather.
Abeles' mid-career survey, Encyclopedia Persona A-Z, toured the United States and South America, and was awarded the Best Regional Museum Show category for 1993-94 by the International Association of Art Critics.
She represented the U.S. in both the Fotografie Biennale Rotterdam and the Cultural Centre of Berchem in Antwerp. Her work is in the collections of the Museum of Contemporary Art, the United States Information Agency, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and is archived in the library collections of the Museum of Modern Art and the Cooper-Hewitt Publication Design Collection of the Smithsonian.
Abeles was awarded grants from the Andy Warhol Foundation and Peter Norton Foundation and fellowships from J. Paul Getty Trust Fund for the Visual Arts, Pollack-Krasner Foundation, and the California Arts Council.