Yashua Klos at the Wellin Museum

Through his print-based collages and sculptures, Yashua Klos explores the intersections among the human form, natural elements, the built environment, and social hierarchies. His practice employs a process of collaging woodblock prints to engage ideas about blackness and maleness as identities that are both fragmented and constructed. His recent work takes on personal histories of race, identity, and familial ties. For this exhibition, the artist is creating a new body of site-responsive collages and sculptures, and collaborating with Hamilton College students on a large-scale, collage-based wall installation to debut at the Wellin Museum.

The artist notes, “I have been exploring identity as a compilation of various influences, as our identities are never sourced from a singular place. We are built from our hopes, the materials of our environment, our gene pool, and the mythologies we adapt.”

Yashua Klos (b. 1977, Chicago, Illinois; lives and works in Brooklyn, New York) received a BFA from Northern Illinois University in DeKalb in 2000 and an MFA from Hunter College, City University of New York, in 2009, both in Fine Art. He has exhibited at the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; the Weatherspoon Museum at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro; Tilton Gallery, New York; and Galerie Anne de Villepoix, Paris, France. His works are included in the Pizzuti Collection, the Seattle Art Museum, and the Wellin Museum of Art’s permanent collection. He has been awarded residencies at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, the Joan Mitchell Center, Skowhegan, and the Vermont Studio Center. He is the recipient of a 2014 Joan Mitchell Foundation grant and a 2015 New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship.