5 & 5 with Studios Alum Garry Noland
Garry Noland, a native of South Dakota, earned a BA (Art History) from the University of Missouri-Kansas City in 1978. Noland is a 2014 Charlotte Street Foundation Visual Artist Fellow. Prior to becoming executive director of the Kansas City Artists Coalition (1986-1991), Noland wrote reviews and criticism for Forum, the magazine of the Kansas City Artists Coalition; New Art Examiner, and Wichita's Art Extra. Noland has had a dedicated studio practice since 1979. Recent and future exhibits include Bemis Center for the Contemporary Arts, Indianapolis Art Center, ROYGBIV, Glass Curtain Gallery, La Esquina Gallery, and the University of Tulsa. Noland was awarded a Studios Inc. Residency in 2011 and currently works from a studio in the Holsum Building.
Noland will have a solo exhibition at studios.gallery in 2026, opening June 5th, and will be on view until July 31st.
Studios Inc. Assistant Gallery Manager Jaede Bayala recently interviewed Noland as part of our series highlighting Artists-in-Residence and their artistic process.
Q: How are you crafting stories within your pieces?
A: It's really about the story of the materials and the reaction to the materials. I don’t think any artist can foretell what that story is going to be like. For instance, if one were to look at my work in the 1990s you wouldn't be able to tell my current work came from that, but if you look now one could see it. Artmaking is such a process with nature, and the only thing determined about it is its indeterminacy. In some ways, I feel like I’m just along for the ride. My career thankfully has been long enough that I can have different bodies of work, and some of these new pieces are an iteration of work from the 1970s.
Q: When you are sourcing materials for your work are you looking for them intentionally or finding them as they appear to you?
A: I’m always looking out for them. I’m always about saving money and being thrifty in one sense, but if artists can use these so-called low-brow materials or even trash, then what that is is a metaphor for how we as people transform ourselves through art. So people are materials too, people and materials are the nouns and the objects, and action is the verb which makes everything go.
Q: What periods of art history do you find yourself most influenced by?
A: All, but there's something about any work of art. For instance, you stand in front of a Giotto painting and you know that that artist stood in front of their painting, and who else stood in front of it; It's like a time machine, a real psychic connection. Or Annie Albers because you know they had that intimate physical relationship with the work. I’m a big fan of landscape architecture and architecture in general. John Constable is one of my favorite painters.
Q: How have you seen your practice evolve over the last 20 years?
A: The commitment to work has stayed the same. Nobody has figured out how to make money off of me. I wonder why that is sometimes because the work does move so quickly from one place to another. I’m glad that I’m not making commodities. When I was in my 20s I never thought what it would be like to be an artist in my 70s, and here I am. It's pretty interesting because I get to have flashbacks about my earliest work and its inspiration for my new work. Art is an evolutionary thing, it's a natural process like nature. Because one body of work affects the other and hopefully we're all in contestant improvement mode. I’m kind of anxious to see what my last piece would be.
Q: When does a painting become a sculpture, and do you feel there needs to be a distinction?
A: Well the sculptures I make, and they all find some way to deliver color, and color is not necessarily the domain of painting. Sculpture is one aspect of painting and painting is an aspect of sculpture and that's why some of my paintings don’t depict anything but they enforce the idea that they’re an object, and they’re carrying color so they act like paintings but they’re also objects. I see them as independent but related the same way that I exercise the female part of my personality or simultaneously the male part of my personality. It's the whole object, I want to be more than one thing so I think the work reflects that.
