Kim Holleman (born July 23, 1973 in Tampa, Florida) is an emerging contemporary artist, best known for her interdisciplinary approach, which includes: Sculpture, Utopian Architecture, Architectural model making, Installation, Photography, Drawing and Collage to create a complete spectrum of ideas. She attended The Cooper Union in New York and Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam, Holland. She also spent time at Bet Za'lel Academy of Art in Jerusalem, Israel as an undergraduate exchange student. Kim continues to live and work in New York, where the majority of her work is shown.
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Kim Holleman was born in Tampa, Florida. Her maternal grandfather, Neal Lozins, was a NASA rocket designer who worked on the solid rocket boosters for the first space shuttle missions. Her paternal grandfather, Nathan Dale Holleman's aviation machining company fabricated the landing gear on the lunar module, and fulfilled contracts for The United States Government, Pratt and Whitney, Boeing and NASA. Both of her grandfathers worked for or on NASA projects at the onset of the original space program. Holleman credits this to her focus on science, namely the confluence of art, architecture and engineering. Holleman's work is, "inspired by the complexities of the design in nature and the environment".[1]
Holleman’s work addresses concepts of utopia and dystopia, utilitarianism, environmentalism, and ideas about perfect form. She examined how the forms used in the architectural reality of our world connect to our ideas about the natural environment, the sublime and the mundane, and our relationship to conceptual and physical space, this by co-opting found physical forms and highlighting them physically with new matter, both created and found. In order to present something new born out of something familiar, she infuse these objects with a new psychologically by manipulating iconography, controlling visual language, and inverting meaning. This new visual language of iconographic symbols addresses real life issues. In that, the viewers are able to recognize-in a glance- their critical meaning as quickly as they recognize symbols of advertising.
Kim’s first solo show in New York: Law of the Land at Black and White Gallery in Williamsburg, was featured in R.C. Baker’s Best In Show in the Village Voice (2008)[2] and was reviewed again with a feature in the arts section by Alan Gilbert.[3] Major shows include: The Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, A Sense of Place: Work that Examines Changing Concepts of Place, Borders and Nationalism on a Global Scale (2004), and at The John Michael Kohler Arts Center in Wisconsin in the show entitled, Utopia (2006). Her most notable work, Trailer Park, a work of public art was shown at The Storefront for Art and Architecture on Lafayette Street for the show, PORTable (2006)[4] and was featured in the METRO, L Magazine,[5] and other media. Her solo show, The Artificial Homemaker at The Rietveld Pavilion (1996), an all-glass show space in Amsterdam, was filmed for the documentary De Cultuurshok: Foreign Artists in Amsterdam (1996) that aired on Dutch National Television in Holland that year.
The opening event for Kim’s second solo show Circa: 2012 at White Box in July 2008, had nearly 1,000 people in attendance, and the result of wining first place in the inaugural Artists Wanted competition sponsored by Third Ward and Artists Wanted.[6] Circa: 2012 was selected by Papermag as the Word of Mouth show to see that week along with After Nature at The New Museum.[7]
In 2009, her work was on view at NURTUREArt in the first ever Bushwick Biennial,[8] and was exhibited at the The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art new LEED platinum Humanities Building on Cooper Square in January, 2010, for the show, "Rights of Passage".[9]