Statement of Work

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May Tveit is an artist taking the materials of commerce and industry and using them to build abstractions, critique culture, and explore the human condition. Her large scale and formally succinct sculptural work and installations are impactful, relevant and memorable. Found in traditional art venues or in nontraditional settings her installations may exist for a few hours, days, or longer. She typically employs readymade products and architectural structures to investigate systems of order, desire, and use. Her current sculpture and works on paper explore geometric configurations of cardboard boxes and physical/metaphysical aspects of the self and being.

Tveit’s recent solo, two person and group exhibitions include (Cosmic Geometries) Secrist Beach Gallery, (Living, Being) Farmprojects, (Universal Boxes) Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, (Fields, Planes, Systems: Self) Farmprojects, (Drop Unit) Greenlease Gallery (Template Days) UK Art Museum and (Art on Paper) at the Weatherspoon Museum.

Her work has been featured in Art in America, Art Papers, National Public Radio, Bad at Sports, among other periodicals. Tveit is a Charlotte Street Foundation Fellow and has participated in the Anderson Ranch, Haystack, Art Omi, Frans Masereel Centrum, residency programs. She received her BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design, studied in Rome with the RISD European Honors Program, and received her Masters degree from the Domus Academy in Milan, Italy. She has taught at the Rhode Island School of Design, the Kansas City Art Institute, and currently the University of Kansas.

“Amazing studio visit with artist May Tveit whose works create reverberating patterns which expand and contract across time and space – whether they are sculptures, monoprints, or drawings, they form pulsating energy fields which evoke bodily rhythms, sacred geometries, and geological strata. They speak to the desire of perfection and ongoing transformations which sometimes plunge us further and further away from our goals. Stillness and movement, depth and flatness, opposites coexist in the space of Tveit’s works. Some of them feel like anechoic chambers in which one may seek shelter in search of reconnection with the rhythms of the body. Others feel like spaces fraught with tension, carrying the imprint of battles, ruptures, eruptions. In either case, there is a sense of intimacy and transformative potential.” Cristina Albu, Ph.D., Associate Professor, Art History UMKC, School of Humanities and Social Sciences