About
Hello. You have reached a website focused on the artistic practices of Heather Kapplow (no pronouns please, use my name). If you are looking to learn more about my non-art professional work, here’s my LinkedIn page, or, if you're looking for a collection of my art writing, it's here.
To learn about what I'm doing right now or next, see my events page, and if you'd like to read occasional ramblings about my process, I have a sporadically used blog here.
My artist statement is always evolving. Here’s the current, long version:
Heather/Hey There Kapplow is a self-trained conceptual artist based in the USA. Kapplow creates participatory experiences using installation, sound, objects, text, engagement and other strategies to convert audiences into collaborators and complex, hard-to-answer questions into tenderly co-held things, invested with transformative collective care.
Kapplow has been awarded numerous grants, residencies and fellowships, and has had work commissioned for galleries and festivals within the USA and internationally. Most notably, performing at Venice Biennale, Supermarket Art Fair, ARoS Kunstmuseum, ANTI-Festival, Guggenheim Museum, Museo Arte Moderno and the Queens Museum; within works by Guillermo Gómez-Peña and On Kawara, among others.
Kapplow is also a professional language worker and Emmy-nominated researcher, who has written for Hyperallergic and many other publications; is credited on several film/web productions; and co-authored an arts-heavy guidebook to Boston for Emons-Verlag, now in its fourth printing.
Here are some things that other people have said about my art-making that made me feel proud/like I'm on the right track/or made me blush:
"I really liked the way that you made your piece. It was so quiet and gentle. I didn't know for a long time whether you were making an art piece or just being with me and hearing about my favorite kind of cake. I still don't know, but the thing you baked with the pears and the cardamom butter-carmel—I loved it! It was as good as the banana cake. It was so good!"
"Heather plays with concepts gleaned from the everyday and turns them on their head to help audiences see anew conditions and contradictions implicit in existing realities. Heather’s work is critical without being negative, opinionated without being didactic. Heather has become one of my favorite contemporary artists."
"That was the closest encounter I've ever had with a goose. It was thrilling!"
“Our lives, our houses, our cities, our built environment have blinded us to the naked and primordial energies that originally constitute us… ocean, rock, wind, rain, dirt and roots and branches, waterways that surround us - these are signs of the forces that bring our world into being, and we have an intimate share in their mystery. Heather rediscovers traces of such originary forces within the urban environment, be it on an uninhabited island near an airport, in underground waterways that trace a completely different city, or in discarded plastics washed ashore after years at sea, which speak of unknown violence and open-ended time… “
In addition to working both independently and collaboratively on individual projects, I also participate in several ongoing collaborative processes. For more details about my work within ensembles and artist collectives, please visit my ongoing collaborations page.