Katie Hector is conducting her own art show in Brooklyn that runs through Sept. 7.
The above piece, made of triangles, gold leaf and foils, is on of the works on display at Katie Hector’s “No Holds Barred” art show on Manhattan’s Lower East Side this month.
By Madeleine Maccar
Growing up, Katie Hector recalls a recurring theme of art appreciation running through her childhood. With her parents taking her on their frequent pilgrimages to the area’s many art museums, as well as the influences of an art-enthusiast grandmother and a grandfather who was a watercolor painter, Hector said hers was an upbringing that reflected a healthy appreciation for artistic pursuits.
It’s almost inevitable, then, that the Lawrence High School graduate has found herself drawn to the art world—a pursuit that has been a part of her life for as long as she can remember.
“Art is something that I’ve always done ever since I was a little kid,” Hector said. “I can attribute a lot of that to the fact that I grew up with it and had a lot of support—and paper—given to me as a kid, so I just never stopped.”
Now an art handler by day, where she “deals with the start to finish of any given project” from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., Hector also manages the fabrication studio’s workshop, ushering a piece of corporate art “from making the stretchers of the panels up to the time when the piece is installed.”
It is not an uncommon gig, the current New Yorker said, for an up-and-coming artist in the city, and one she considers herself lucky to both land so soon after college and still be a good fit a little more than a year later.
But it is the creation of art that moves Hector, who found herself in Brooklyn not too long after receiving her bachelor’s degree at Rutgers University’s Mason Gross School of Arts, where she double-majored in painting and art history.
So rather than waiting for the perfect exhibit to materialize, Hector took matters into her own hands and decided to curate her own.
“It really started in March, that’s when I began developing different ways to showcase artwork,” she said. “I also realized that I’m a pretty young artist and that maybe these opportunities won’t necessarily get handed to me the same way they might be to somebody who’s a mid-career artist, who’s more established or represented by a gallery. So I was really interested in finding space to not only showcase my artwork but also that of my peers whose work I absolutely respect and admire.”
And so No Holds Barred was born. Running from Aug. 10 to Sept. 7 at 191 Henry St. in Manhattan’s Lower East Side, the evolving art exhibit is a multidisciplinary showcase that brings together more than 20 artists representing a range of media and disciplines in a truly communal and deliberately nontraditional performance and exhibit space. Hector aims to bring the artistic experience to the public by offering a stage for emerging visual and performing artists alike.
By uniting the fine, performing, and musical arts in four distinct shows and a handful of separate performances, Hector also hopes to foster a sense of community among her fellow young artists, who are often in need of a wider network of connections and can benefit from introductions to artists outside their preferred medium.
“It’s been a really beneficial project series so far,” Hector said. “It’s brought a community together, it’s given people a lot resources. My goal was to get everyone together to see each other’s work and for them to appreciate it as much as I do. I want them to see the community forming amongst us, expand the dialog a little more, and give everyone more resources so no one feels like they don’t have anyone to turn to when they’re back in their studios.”
With whimsical, unmistakably art-world names like “Flux Hustle,” “- – – – – – – -,” “Grime Surge” and “Trick Endings” dominating the roster of rotating events that compose Hector’s project series, the range of art represented over the course of No Holds Barred is an impressive one—“I crammed a lot into one month,” Hector concedes with a laugh.
She said that the first two weeks of the show featured painters, sculptors, an installation artist, several different video artists, and paintings. The third week was a big collaborative installation project that transformed the gallery into an interactive, activated space.
The final week from Aug. 31 through Sept. 7, will feature works by Hector her collaborators. A reception will be held at the gallery on Sept. 5 from 6 to 9 p.m.at the gallery.
Patricia Brace, a performance artist currently teaching at Rutgers University, first crossed paths with Hector at the college when the former was a grad student and the latter was completing her undergrad work. Hector had contacted Brace earlier in the summer to gauge her interest in collaborative curation, and Brace is thrilled to have been offered the opportunity.
“Katie is amazing,” Brace said. “She’s has that mixture of determination and ambition and foresight and an ability to follow through with things that’s really unique, and I just have so much respect for her.”
She adds that the two had no trouble reconciling their different artistic backgrounds to close out No Holds Barred with their collaborative installation: “We’re going to build an installation in the gallery so we’ll be performing in one large sculpture. Katie kind of transcends different media in her work and we both are interdisciplinary artists, so when we were thinking about the space, it worked out really quite cohesively and naturally to do an installation and perform in it.”
Taking the solitary nature of fine art and translating it to the more collaborative nature of both performing and musical arts has been one of Hector’s primary objectives. She said that the willingness displayed by all the artists she worked with—and the many people who had a hand in getting the show off the ground, ranging from help in writing press releases to late-night moral support—to make No Holds Barred a success has been a rather pleasant shock.
“I don’t want to say I’m surprised because it’s going to sound like I’m a little cynical, but I really am surprised at the cooperation of more than 20 artists who are putting in their own bits and pieces,” Hector said. “The enthusiasm that everyone’s shown, their willingness to do their parts, and how happy they are to devote time and energy toward something that they believe in—I think that’s probably the most surprising part, how excited everyone is for something that I’m excited about, too.”
For more information about “No Holds Barred,” which is in its final days, visit nhbps.tumblr.com/2.
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