See all Grant & Fellowship Recipients

Crystal Gregory

2022 Kentucky Fellow

Crystal Gregory

Recipient Information

Location

Lexington, Kentucky

Medium

Sculpture

Year of Award

2022

Grant or Fellowship

Southern Prize and State Fellowships

Grant Amount

$5,000

Artist Statement

If the nature of architecture is fixed and permanent then the opposite would be a textile, collapsible and movable. Further consideration would show more common links than differences. Both mediums define space, create shelter and allow privacy; a textile however, has the advantage of flexibility. It is a semi two-dimensional plane that has the ability to fold, drape, move and change to its surroundings.

My work uses cloth construction as a fundamental center, a place to start from and move back to. With a background in weaving, I see myself as a builder; drawing clear connections between the lines of thread laid perpendicularly through a warp and the construction of architectural spaces.

​Formally, my work takes shape through a pallet of building materials either paired with or mimicking textiles. I found a tension between materials like concrete and the structural patterns of cloth. By pairing these seemingly opposite worlds together I invert material stereotypes, using the ‘delicate’ material to exhibit strength or exposing the ‘structural’ materials’ instabilities. These gestures allow for a reinterpretation of material identities leaving the viewer to confront their understanding of these everyday utilities.

Biography

Crystal Gregory is a sculptor whose work investigates the intersections between textile and architecture. Gregory received her BFA from the University of Oregon and her MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago from the Fiber and Material Studies Department. In 2013 she was awarded The Leonore Annenberg Fellowship for the Performing and Visual Arts. With this grant she moved to Amsterdam, where she took a role as Guest Artist at The Gerrit Rietveld Academie of Art. Her work has been exhibited in museums and galleries nationally and internationally including Through the Thread at the Rockwell Museum of Art, Devotion/Destruction: Craft Inheritance at Dorsky Gallery Curatorial Projects, Load Barring: The Art of Construction at The Hunterdon Art Museum, and Crossover at Black and White Project Space. Gregory’s work has been reviewed in publications such as Hyperallergic, Surface Design Journal, Art Critical, and Peripheral Vision Press. Gregory is an Associate Professor within the School of Arts and Visual Studies at the University of Kentucky and currently shows with Tappan Collective in Los Angeles, CA; Imlay Gallery; and Momentum Gallery, NC.