Exhibitions
KATO + KUEHNLE
Tri-Star Arts / 4450 Candora Ave., Candoro Marble Building June 20 - August 27th (Reception: June 20 5:00pm - 8:00pm)
Mimi Kato, Jimmy Kuehnle
Tri-Star Arts is pleased to present the next exhibition in their Main Gallery at the historic Candoro Marble Building. A two-person show, Kato + Kuehnle, featuring recent works by artists Mimi Kato (Cleveland, OH) and Jimmy Kuehnle (Cleveland, OH) opens Friday, June 20 and will run through Wednesday, August 27, 2025. Curator: Brian R. Jobe.
An opening reception will be held on Friday, June 20, 2025 from 5:00 until 8:00 pm (artists in attendance). There will be a joint artist talk given by Kato and Kuehnle beforehand on June 20 from 3:30 until 4:30pm. The address is 4450 Candora Avenue, Knoxville, TN 37920 and admission is always free of charge. Visitors should drive only on the crushed gravel driveway and parking lot surfaces. Driving vehicles on the lawn is always prohibited.
Longtime partners in art and life, Mimi Kato and Jimmy Kuehnle offer a snapshot of how synchronous artistic practices can intersect and diverge in their two-person show, Kato + Kuehnle. The durational nature of their evolving studio projects and subtle influences upon each other’s methodologies and approaches can be seen in Kato’s new video project, Twinkle Twinkle Orchestra, and Kuehnle’s new site-responsive version of Wiggle, Giggle, Jiggle, an inflatable architectural sculpture adapted for the Tri-Star Arts Main Gallery at the Candoro Marble Building.
Kato and Kuehnle each incorporate playfulness and whimsy through audience conscious projects, yet vary in sensibility. Kato’s media-centric works are alive with implied movement and often employ directional indicators in the form of posed figures. Kuehnle’s work is in turns designed to move, can be activated by the artist as driver (in the case of custom bicycles and inflated suits), and invites the audience in as participants in activated sites.
Both artists will expound on working alongside each other for nearly 25 years as well as provide insights on their new works in their joint artist talk on June 20 at 3:30 pm.
Native to Nara, Japan, Mimi Kato has lived and worked in the United States since 1998. Kato received her MFA from the University of Texas at San Antonio in 2006. She has participated in numerous residency programs across the country such as the Roswell Artist-in-Residence Program (Roswell, NM) in 2008, the MacDowell Colony (Peterborough, NH) in 2010, and Spaces SWAP program (Cleveland, OH) in 2013. Kato was selected for the Women to Watch exhibition at the National Museum of Women in the Arts to represent artists in Ohio in 2015. She had a solo exhibition at Columbia Museum of Art (Columbia, SC) in 2019. Kato is currently raising her son in Cleveland, OH.
Jimmy Kuehnle, who teaches at the Cleveland Institute of Art, has exhibited in the United States and internationally. In 2014, he was selected for the national survey exhibition State of the Art: Discovering American Art Now at the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art (Bentonville, AR). In 2015, he installed a large kinetic inflatable in the atrium of MOCA Cleveland (OH) as part of the group exhibition How to Remain Human. In 2016, Kuehnle received a Creative Workforce Fellowship. His 2016 solo exhibition at the Hudson River Museum (Yonkers, NY) was favorably reviewed in The New York Times, featured in New York Magazine’s “Approval Matrix” and recommended by publications such as the New York Daily News, Artnet, and Hyperallergic. In 2016, his monumentally scaled site-specific inflatable at the Akron Art Museum (OH), Wiggle, Giggle, Jiggle, was reviewed in the Plain Dealer, Akron Beacon Journal, Canvas Magazine, CAN Journal, and WCPN’s the Sound of Applause. In 2018, he exhibited a new interactive inflatable an exhibition at the Exploratorium Museum in San Francisco, CA. In 2019, he opened Wow, Pop, Bliss, an exhibition of 4 new interactive inflatables at the Columbia Museum of Art in Columbia, SC. In 2019, he unveiled a new interactive inflatable LED light sculpture for BLINK 2019 in Cincinnati, OH. His inflatable installation Bau(ncy) Haus is part of the internationally traveling Balloon Museum.
