The Galleries host a rotating display of historical, contemporary, and thematic exhibitions that feature national and global artists.
THANK YOU 2026 EXHIBITION SPONSORS
BOULEVARD INN & BISTRO, MID-WEST FAMILY MARKETING & MEDIA, SILVER BEACH PIZZA, THE JOHN DEVRIES INSURANCE AGENCY, KRUGGEL LAWTON CPA, SVEN ERICKSON AND CHRISTOPHER FLORIAN, and VISIT SOUTHWEST MICHIGAN.
Material Memory
February 07-May 09
Material Memory explores how knowledge, history, and cultural memory are carried through objects and the act of making. Bringing together four artists working in ceramics, fiber, tapestry, and print, the exhibition centers analog processes, material investigation, and the slow accumulation of gesture and meaning.
Through hand-built ceramics, bead-encrusted vessels, pony-bead tapestries, and meticulously carved relief prints, the artists in Material Memory examine how culture and personal histories are inherited, learned, and reinterpreted through labor, repetition, and intimate engagement with material. These works ask viewers to consider how objects embody memory, mediate identity, and carry stories across generations.
Featuring:
Chris Salas (Ceramics)
Salas’s hand-built ceramic forms emerge through intuitive, iterative processes informed by personal relationships, historical research, and the ongoing legacy of colonization in the Americas. Clay becomes a vessel for cultural reckoning, holding layered histories through time-intensive making and surface.
Katie Mongoven (Fiber, Beading)
Mongoven transforms found blue-and-white ceramic vessels with intricate beadwork and embroidery. Her labor-intensive practice explores diasporic memory, identity reconstruction, and the reclamation of Orientalist objects through touch, repetition, and bodily presence.
akeylah wellington (Sculpture, Tapestry)
Wellington’s pony-bead tapestries and mixed-media sculptures blend humor, endurance, and personal history. Drawing on childhood imagery, early digital culture, and found materials, her work preserves stories of displacement, resilience, and generational inheritance.
Ramiro Rodriguez (Printmaking)
Rodriguez’s woodblock and linoleum relief prints document familial and cultural narratives rooted in Mexican-American print traditions. Through carving and layered printing, his work embeds memory, transformation, and inherited knowledge into the physical act of making.
Together, the artists in Material Memory use material as language—foregrounding slow, analog processes as acts of remembering, learning, and transmission. Their works are deeply personal yet culturally resonant, tracing the invisible threads of inheritance that bind past, present, and future.
ARTIST OPPORTUNITIES
Interested in exhibiting at Krasl Art Center? KAC displays contemporary art indoors and out year-round. We value experimentation, innovation, excellence, timeliness and relevance.
If you are an artist or curator with an exhibition concept or body of work that meets these values, please submit a proposal to curatorial@krasl.org.
Exhibition proposals are reviewed on an ongoing basis and held for 2 years. Due to the quantity received, we will contact you only in the event of an exhibition opportunity.
Artists and curators are encouraged to review the gallery plan by clicking here to ensure proposals are scaled appropriately.
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- Krasl Art Center
- 707 Lake Boulevard
- St. Joseph, MI 49085
- 269.983.0271
- ©2026
