One-Way Trail, Art In The Garden

March 12, 2015 – January 31, 2016
San Antonio Botanical Garden

Featuring Kim Beck

Art in the Garden is an annual collaboration with the San Antonio Botanical Garden.

This year’s Art in the Garden project features interdisciplinary artist Kim Beck. The project, One-Way Trail, consists of a series of walks and sits throughout the garden. It takes the usual form of the guided tour led by an expert and inverts it. The walks and sits were created in collaboration with people who are non-specialist in the park but rather who are specialists in other fields. Each tour is led using signage throughout the garden, printed maps, and audio. Garden visitors will find themselves led by unexpected guides, such as a rancher, a dog, and a Buddhist priest. Live tours will be conducted at the exhibition opening and when the artist returns later in the year for an artist talk.

View the One-Way Trail garden map and guide bios here.

Kim Beck grew up in Colorado and currently lives in Pittsburgh. Her work has been shown on the High Line, at the Walker Art Center, Carnegie Museum of Art, Smack Mellon, Socrates Sculpture Park, Hallwalls Contemporary Art Center, the Warhol Museum, the Minneapolis Institute of Art, the Omi International Arts Center and is currently on view at 100 Acres: the Virginia B. Fairbanks Art & Nature Park at the Indianapolis Museum of Art. She has been a fellow at the MacDowell Colony, Art Omi, Yaddo, Marie Walsh Sharpe Space Program, International Studio & Curatorial Program, Cité Internationale des Arts, Vermont Studio Center, & VCCA and has received awards from ARS Electronica, Pollock-Krasner, Heinz Foundation, Thomas J. Watson Foundation and Printed Matter. Beck has an MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design and BA from Brandeis University. She is represented by Mixed Greens, NYC, and Pentimenti Gallery, Philadelphia and is an Associate Professor of Art at Carnegie Mellon.

Using images of architecture and landscape, Kim Beck makes drawings, paintings, prints, photographs, books, cutout sculptures and installations that survey peripheral and suburban spaces. Electrical transformers, cell towers, and billboards grow like invasive species. And invasive species, such as dandelions, pop up in photographs of lawns and installations using vinyl decals, stuck directly to walls and windows. These create mutated landscapes, alien-but-familiar spaces in a continuous state of flux. Her work urges a reconsideration of the built environment – the peculiar street signs, gas station banners, overgrown weeded lots, and self-storage buildings — bringing the banal and everyday into focus. View more of Kim’s work online here.