May Tveit

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May Tveit

May Tveit is a large scale sculptural artist whose studio is based in Kansas City, Missouri. Tveit was born in 1966 in Nyack, New York. Tveit was raised in Cambell Hall, New York, an area in upstate New York. Tveit's father was a carpenter so she was immersed in an environment where she spent considerable amounts of time in the houses he was constructing and from a young age gained immense respect for the process of making things by hand.She holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts Degree from the Rhode Island School of Design, studied in Rome with the RISD European Honors Program, and received her Masters Degree from the Domus Academy in Milan, Italy. She has taught at the Rhode Island School of Design, and taught for three years at the Kansas City Art Institute. May Tveit is trained as an Industrial Designer and currently teaches Industrial Design at the University of Kansas which she began teaching for in 1999. Tveit's work revolves around her fascination with the materials and processes that inform and define industrial design and inspires her to deconstruct the forms that compose our manufactured world. Tveit's sculptural installations have been shown around the Kansas City, Missouri area and internationally for over two decades. Tveit's work has been presented in both traditional and non traditional spaces, factories, fields, parking lots, sidewalks, a tram interior, and even a grocery store. The materials and mediums in which Tveit has produced work in is also broad and constantly changing. To name a few, she has produced work in fabric, hay bails, language, jumbo balloons, embroidered name tags, metal bowls, garbage cans, and corrugated cardboard.

Background and Education

In 1989, Tveit received her BFA (Bachelor of Fine Arts) from the Rhode Island School of Design located in Providence, Rhode Island. Also in 1989 and through the Rhode Island School of Design's European Honors Program, Tveit studied in Rome, Italy. During her time as a BFA student at the Rhode Island School of Design, she attended a field trip to a small metal spinning facility where her fascination with industrial processes grew as she watched the metal spinners at the facility transform a simple piece of sheet metal into complex curvilinear vessels on a lathe. Tveit's interest with the universal functions of materials began at this facility where the sheet metal vessels were made into either funerary urns or warheads. In 1991, Tveit attended the Domus Academy in Milan, Italy where she received her MID (Master of Industrial Design). Tveit's work speaks of her reverence for utilitarian materials and for designed and manufactured products. Through her work, Tveit explores this deep curiosity about who makes every day products and how are they produced. Tveit is trained as an industrial designer which influences her process in creating each body of work and it is through this platform and vocabulary that she makes art.

Career

Early Work

In 2001, Tveit was chosen to be one of six artists to create temporary outdoor installations for Kansas City, Missouri's downtown strip of Central Street known as the "Avenue of the Arts". Tveit's installation, "Curtain Wall", featured billowy pastel curtains made out of 3 x 9 foot polyester voile custom-made curtain panels that hung out of the sixty-nine windows on the Centennial Building located at tenth and Central street. The addition of pastel colored fabric to the austere and geometric facade of the Centennial Building feminizes the structure and references its historical location in the industrial district where in the 1920s and 1930s manufacturers of biscuits, tires, underwear and tennis rackets had businesses here. Perhaps more specifically relevant though, is Tveit's reference to the U.S. Curtain Co. which was also located in this area back then. Tveit's intention for adding the curtains was in an attempt to turn the building inside out and "by moving and changing with the elements, the curtains will call attention to "the world around the architecture that is often invisible."

In 2002, Tveit created her installation piece "Retail Therapy" which was a commentary on President Bush's post-September 11,2001 redefinition of shopping as a patriotic act. The work featured three 9x15 ft. industrial shelving units with enamel paint, one hundred and thirty-five 3 x 4 ft. wood pallets, latex paint, one hundred and thirty-five 36” latex rubber balloons with print. The work was exhibited at The Kansas City Jewish Museum Epsten Gallery Village Shalom. For Tveit she said, "prior to September 11th, the ‘products’ on the shelves were going to be derived from the psychology of consumption; need, greed, want, desire, fulfillment, etc….paired with looking at product icons that might express our current historical moment. One idea was to use cans of ‘slimfast’ as that icon. 100 cans of slimfast, like Warhols 100 Campbell Soupcans…  but after the 11th, these ideas seemed somewhat trite and trivial. The vision of a superstore persisted in my mind", in regards to the finished product, "Retail Therapy".

In 2007, Tveit produced her piece titled "Inner Package", for the the Review Exhibition Space in Kansas City, Missouri. The purpose of the piece was to force people to imagine thought made visual in the stereotypical cartoon-like dialogue bubbles which were made from thin ultralight trupan, industrial acrylic. The language Tveit had within the bubbles was both English and Mandarin Chinese serving to reveal and remind the viewer that "entire economies, histories, cultures, and peoples are embedded in the conversations we have and the things we buy". In a foreshadowing for her later work "Universal Boxes", Tveit took the term "Inner Package" from international shipping labels where it is used to let the sender or receiver know that there is something on the inside of something else.

In 2009, Tveit created five distinct bodies of work titled "Field Test" which were 15 x 18 x 37 inch haybales made from wheat straw, urethane hardcoat, and car paint. Tveit situated them in unexpected locations in towns within and around the Cape Cod National Seashore.Tveit's inspiration for the project was in the rectangular and circular haybales that are scattered across the fields where she commuted daily for her job from Kansas City, Missouri to Lawrence, Kansas. For Tveit, the work was initially an aesthetic study about the minimalist yet iconic forms which connect all of us to our agrarian and agricultural past and how that related to the present. The cyclical destruction of fields and farmland to make room for expanding suburban development made Tveit want to force people to take notice of them and what they symbolize. Another piece Tveit created in 2009 was her piece "United Divided", made from a 5 x 78 ft. table, 104 work stools and 5,000 embroidered name tags, this piece functioned as a site-specific installation in which Tveit appropriated the building, its contents, and its workers as an art object for three days.

Mature Work

In Tveit's installation, Universal Boxes her interest is in the research and exploration of the "ubiquitous cardboard box". Tveit's exhibition for "Universal Boxes" was on display from October 19, 2017 - January 28, 2018 at the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art. The eight installation pieces of May Tveit’s cardboard sculptures "emerge from the walls like sentries, layers of flat, precision-cut cardboard stacked into pyramids arranged in various rectangles". The forms of Tveit's layered, deconstructed boxes are reminiscent of the foundations surrounding public plazas where layers of thin concrete steps lead up to the buildings or of architectural floor plans. In one radio interview by KCUR, an NPR flagship station for the Kansas City metro area, the work was described as such, "up close, the terraced lines of corrugation make shadows like rows of corn stubble in a winter field. From farther away, a couple of the sculptures feel like featureless totem poles". The work produced in "Universal Boxes" came about as a result of Tveit's two year residency at the Lawrence Paper Company factory. Tveit's interest was not in the essential manufactured product being made at the factory but in viewing the box as "a physical thing, an emotional thing, a psychological thing" and then going further to "think about the box as a generic product that’s designed to hold, to hide, to protect, to transport the useful and useless contents of our lives. And then thinking about the self, the box as the self." Even the name for her installation "Universal Boxes" came from the factory as she became familiarized with the two dimensional prototype, a packaging-design template for what’s known in the industry as a "universal box." The name served to mean more to Tveit as she viewed the label 'universal box' and connected it to other "universals" such as "universal truths, universal values, universality in terms of being a human being.” The creation of the boxes was an intimate experience for Tveit herself and she views them as self portraits.

Solo Exhibitions/Projects

• 2002 Retail Therapy Epsten Gallery, Overland Park, KS
• 2004 United Divided United Metal Spinning Company Kansas City, MO
• 2007 Inner Package Review Exhibition Space Kansas City, MO
• 2007 Inner Package UCM Gallery Warrensburg, MO
• 2009 Field Test Farm Projectspace Wellfleet, MA
• 2011 Product Placement International Export Venice, Italy; Berlin, Germany
• 2012 Field Test The Fields Sculpture Park Ghent, NY
• 2012 Product Placement Gridspace New York, NY
• 2015 Product Placement Selfie Series Fuori Biennale Venice, Italy
• 2017 Universal Boxes The Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art Overland Park, KS

Group Exhibitions

• 2001 Curtain Wall Avenue of the Arts Kansas City, MO
• 2001 Charlotte Street Foundation Award Exhibition JCCC Gallery of Art Overland Park, KS
• 2003 Big and Beautiful H&R Block Artspace Kansas City, MO
• 2004 Fantasies and Revivals: Kansas City's Urban Future, Paragraph Gallery Kansas City, MO
• 2006 Globalspeak Studios Inc. Kansas City, MO
• 2006 Between the Observer and the Observed Lianzhou, China
• 2006 American Dream- In Question Belger Art Center Kansas City, MO
• 2008 Art the Vote Billboard Series St. Louis, Kansas City, Columbia, MO
• 2009 Postcards from the Heartland APF lab, Art Production Fund New York, NY
• 2009 Color Field & Frosted Flakes Etherington Fine Art Marfa, TX
• 2010 Product Placement Schoolhouse Gallery Provincetown, MO
• 2010 Fit Studios Inc. Kansas City, MO
• 2010 Sanctioned Array Whitebox Gallery New York, NY
• 2010-11 Conversation Matter Grand Arts Kansas City, MO
• 2011 Citizenship-60second Take H&R Block Artspace Kansas City, MO
• 2011 America Now and Here Leedy Voulkas Gallery Kansas City, MO
• 2012 Rapid Transit Mongolian National Modern Art Gallery Ulaanbaataar, Mongolia
• 2014 Kansas City Flatfiles H&R Block Artspace Kansas City, MO
• 2014 Station to Station Union Station Parking Lot Kansas City, MO

Awards

• Andy Warhol Foundation- Rocket Grant
• Art Omi International- residency
• American Institute of Architects - Allied Arts and Crafts Award
• Center for East Asian Studies - grant
• Hall Center for the Humanities - creative work fellowship
• Charlotte Street Foundation - award

References

This article "May Tveit" is from Wikipedia. The list of its authors can be seen in its historical and/or the page Edithistory:May Tveit. Articles copied from Draft Namespace on Wikipedia could be seen on the Draft Namespace of Wikipedia and not main one.

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