Kathleen Caprario

Patterns of Privilege: I Stand Upon You #3
acrylic and spray paint on wood panel; gilt frame 
30” x 30” 
2020 
$2200 framed 

Patterns of Privilege: Under My Skin
artist designed wallpaper printed on vinyl 
each panel 96” x 42” 
$325 per panel 

Patterns of Privilege: Past Present 1
acrylic, spray paint, text collage on wood panel 
16” x 16” 
2019 
$850

Patterns of Privilege: Past Present 2
acrylic, spray paint, text collage on wood panel 
16” x 16” 
2019 
$850

*25% of each Artist Amount of a sale of any of these pieces will be donated to the Lane County Chapter, NAACP  


As a social practice work, A Critical Conversation’s intention is to provide context and the opportunity to engage with the most critical and challenging conversation facing our community through the power of art and the creative agency of artists. By bringing together these artists, how does exhibiting their work together inform and challenge their practices on an individual basis as well as impacting the community? A Critical Conversation aspires to be a model and inspiration that supports artists and community dialog. 

Questions rather than answers pervade my work. Can issues of justice, both environmental and social, be examined and shared through the open language of pattern? And how do I, as a white woman in America, (re) locate myself within the critical conversation surrounding racism, art and privilege without perpetuating a colonized stance and privilege? This is the challenging space I intend to explore as I consider the land and its complex social history to create a compression of time, a dialog between the past and present and a conversation for today. The metaphor-laden and abstracted panel paintings and artist designed wallpaper presented are a specific response to my experience of the Sweet Briar Slave Cemetery, Amherst, VA, while I was in residence at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts in 2018 as a Jane G. Camp Fellow. 

I respectfully acknowledge the land that my work was inspired by and created on including the original stewards, the Siouan People of the Monacan and Manahoac tribes of the Piedmont and Blue Ridge Mountain regions of Virginia and, here in Eugene/Springfield, the traditional indigenous homeland of the Kalapuya people. 

This presentation is made possible through the generosity and receipt of a Lane Arts Artist Grant, a Jordan Schnitzer Black Lives Matter Artist Grant (with Gregory S. Black), a Virginia Center for the Creative Arts Residency Jane G. Camp Fellowship Award and an OAC Career Opportunity Grant.