KRISTOPHER WRIGHT

-Kristopher, we'd love to hear your story and how you got to where you are today, both personally and as an artist.

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I was born in Denver but did most of my growing up in Chicago. As a child, my mother would take me to the Art Institute almost every weekend - That's where I fell in love with painting and the energy of the city. Somehow I already knew I wanted to make something that contained the same power that those works had. 

 

As a teenager, I found that skateboarding and artistic creativity go hand in hand; both require individuality, problem solving, an understanding of what came before, and the willingness to fall more than you land. I quickly fell in love with skating's rock and roll aesthetic and discovered that I could pay for more equipment if I began making stencils and designing t-shirts and decks for my friends. That was the first time I ever got paid for my work and It felt like magic!

 

After graduating high school, I enrolled at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago where I studied painting, screen printing, and later, Art Education. As young student-artists looking to create opportunities for ourselves, my friends and I started throwing our own 'Art Shows'. AKA house parties where we filled the walls with our own work. Through those experiences I learned that my artistic practice could be so much bigger. It can look like collaboration, it can look like storytelling, it can look like curation, it can look like community!

 

I met Corianne, my future wife, at school. After graduating, we decided to start fresh by selling everything and moving together back to Denver. At that time, the path was really unclear. We didn't know anyone, but we knew the best way to get connected to our new artistic community was to get involved.

 

In April of 2016 we launched ODESSA Nomadic, a small website where local artists and enthusiasts could track all the exhibitions and other events happening around the city; we began writing about artwork we loved, hosting roundtable events, curating small exhibitions, and eventually partnered with Collective SML k in the Santa Fe Arts district to open Odessa Gallery for two years.

 

In 2019 after 12 exhibitions and dozens of events, we closed the gallery and moved to an 80-acre ranch Colorado's San Luis Valley - A small farming town up in the Sangre De Cristo Mountains. Around that time, we accepted joint positions as Director of Galleries and Professor of Museum Studies at the University of Northern Colorado. This provided an amazing opportunity to teach at a high level, make a more stable income, and focus energy back onto our individual artistic practices! 

 

Over the next year and a half we renovated an old stable shed into a full studio right here on the ranch! - Adding flooring, electricity, drywall and insulation. Finally, in 2021, I returned to my own studio practice full-time and began work on this latest body of work, 'Just As I Am' which is now on view at BMoCA.