Kristy Hughes

Kristy Hughes: Into Your Sunlit Hope

On view July 7 – August 19, 2023

Kristy Hughes’ Into your Sunlit Hope is a new series of work about empowerment, gratitude, and the potential for change. Her abstract sculptures are homages to thank the formative people and places of her past. Manifested by embedding found and collected ephemera into the surfaces of the works, the sculptures also honor the landscape of her ever-shifting creative space. The works celebrate shimmering moments of transformation, oscillating between the grandiose and the mundane.  

In the words of Hilton Als, from which the show is titled, we are, “walking proudly into your sunlit hope, ghosts and all.” Hughes makes sculptures intended to deliberately push back against the white-supremacist, capitalistic, patriarchal, and classist societal systems that she works within. Into Your Sunlit Hope is a statement that small is significant. The work is hopeful. Despite of. Regardless of.

Kristy Hughes (b. 1987, Waxahachie, TX) is a sculptor, painter, and educator. She received her MFA from Indiana University and her MA and BA from Eastern Illinois University. She was awarded a 2022-23 Visual Arts Fellowship at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, MA, and has been the recipient of a number of residencies and fellowships. Recent solo and group exhibitions include: Hudson D. Walker Gallery, Provincetown, MA, Soft Times Gallery, San Francisco, CA, Wassaic Project, Wassaic, NY, in addition to exhibitions at universities in North Carolina and South Carolina. Hughes is the Residency Coordinator for the Elizabeth Murray Artist Residency by Collar Works and will be joining the faculty at the University of Vermont in Burlington in Fall 2023.

More about Kristy Hughes here. 

Kristy Hughes is a recipient of The Sculpture Center’s Revealed Early Career Exhibition Series.