Beth Krebs is an interdisciplinary artist whose work includes site responsive installations, performance videos, sculpture, and participatory projects. A graduate of the MFA program at Rutgers University, Beth has exhibited her work in New York City, San Francisco and abroad, at venues including Riverside Park (NYC), Station Independent Projects (NYC), Mixed Greens, Storefront Ten Eyck, Southern Exposure, Marin MoCA and the San Jose ICA. She has been awarded fellowships at the MacDowell Colony, the Bemis Center, the Montalvo Arts Center and Recology San Francisco (the dump). She is a recipient of a Joan Mitchell Foundation MFA grant, and in 2012 was awarded a grant from the Buchegger Foundation to fund an installation in Germany. In 2019 and 2020, while the San Jose Institute for Contemporary Art was closed due to Covid restrictions, her interactive telephone hotline took over their phone line. She is a member of Real Time and Space, an artist studio community in Oakland, California, where she lives.
Watch my artist talk with Lehna Huie (December 2019), co-hosted by Voices of Contemporary Art (VoCA) and the Joan Mitchell Foundation, and moderated by Christie Mitchell, Senior Curatorial Assistant at the Whitney Museum of American Art.
Statement
My work contends with the absurdity and valor of being an embodied, striving creature. Recent participatory projects have looked, with tenderness and humor, at some human coping mechanisms: looping thoughts and luck charms. Performance videos use low fi “magic” to re-enchant my sometimes world-weary adulthood or poke fun at the assumptions of my middle class upbringing. The “fatties” series, made from reclaimed fabric and found objects, is an ongoing sculptural exploration of my ambivalent relationship to vulnerability, my female body, and the beginnings of self-acceptance.