Cassidy Skillman

SAIC SHOWS 2023 GRADUATE EXHIBITIONS

Graduates

SAIC SHOWS 2023 GRADUATE EXHIBITIONS

Master of Fine Arts in Studio, Printmedia

Cassidy Skillman is an interdisciplinary artist from the East San Francisco Bay Area. Skillman’s artwork illustrates social commentaries that reflects her interests in cultural, ecological and environmental consciousness. She utilizes research, storytelling and story building, applying her extensive studio education to create an expansive range of work. In 2021, Skillman received a BA in Studio Arts from the University of California, Santa Cruz after transferring from Diablo Valley College in Pleasant Hill, CA. Skillman is currently on the Board of Directors for the California Society of Printmakers as Director of Social Media.

Peggy Adjusting, 2021, Lithographic photomontage, 18 x 20 in.

During WWII Peggy was in Paris and purchased many works of art to protect them from Nazi looting during the invasion. She claimed to be an impartial art purchaser yet that seems to hold a bias. This makes me question how her role in these acquisitions helped direct our Eurocentric interests.. But as she turned her eyes away from the corrupt practices of her family's investments, she inevitably helped with the allure of the flawfilled institution as it continues to build on extractive practices. This brings me to her collecting of Calder, a conceptually overlooked artist who has been highly institutionalized within private collections. By abstracting and weightlessly minimalizing nature in such a visually commanding way, like with floating metal petals, he also seemed to promote a post-nature extractive and industrialized art space. These same themes can be debated about Frank Lloyd Wright's organic architecture. Further we can ponder how Wrights' work may have masked and restrained the visibility of the Guggenheim’s extractive corruption.

The Guggenheim, 2021, Lithographic photomontage, 20 x 18 in.

This lithographic photomontage print depicts the Guggenheim: Closed for Restoration and stands together alongside Peggy Adjusting. The Guggenheim has a long and corruptive history of extracting raw materials. This oil and mining wealth started much before Peggy's contributions to the Guggenheim franchise and collections (including her own) as well as extraction continues to help fund the Solomon R Guggenheim institution through multiple forms of patronages.

Cassidy Skillman - Closed For Restoration: Met (Progress Photo)

Closed For Restoration: Met (Progress Photo), 2022, Reduction woodcut on Kozo, 30 x 22 in.

Cassidy Skillman - Closed For Restoration: Guggenheim

Closed For Restoration: Guggenheim, 2020, Reduction woodcut on Arches, 30 x 22 in.

The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, along with many other institutions, have namesakes tainted with investments in fossil fuels. I imagine this beautiful museum as an aesthetic front built from corrupt fundings in extracting raw minerals, oil, and gas. While the museum is closed for restoration, the Frank Lloyd Wright architecture oozes oil as the rigs drill for fine art.

Cassidy Skillman - Closed For Restoration: MoMA

Closed For Restoration: MoMA, 2021, Reduction woodcut on Kozo, 30 x 22 in.

The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) is connected to a plethora of unethical philanthropy including extractivism, war, etc. In this print, I am drawing focus to the investments in the racist prison-industrial-complex, mass detention and deportation systems that enrich and support the MoMA’s private funding sources. While the museum is closed for restoration, the Museum of Modern Art galleries become a prison block where art is detained behind steel bars.

Closed For Restoration: Guggenheim, 2022, Animation, 01:07 min.

Do you ever wonder what decisions are made within the walls of the art institution? What hangs in the museum vaults off-view? What does the private sector not want the public art enthusiast to see or know about?

The ongoing reduction woodcut series, Closed for Restoration, is a critique of the lack of transparency behind the leading art institutions in the United States; beginning with New York. Hidden beyond fine art, museums can be an aesthetic front to massive investments from arguably corrupt systems such as extraction, detention facilities and art crimes. For this reason it is imperative we recognize that the success of most large-scale cultural institutions has deceptively contributed to exploitation.

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