Austen Camille
The Kent Cultural Alliance (KCA) is excited to kick off 2025 with an engaging exhibit of art and poetry by artist Austen Camille. The exhibit opens on First Friday, February 7 from 5-8 pm and also features an Artist Talk & Panel Discussion on Thursday, February 13, at 6 pm. The exhibit and artist talk will take place at the Raimond Cultural Center, 101 Spring Avenue, Chestertown, MD.
Many will remember Austen Camille as being part of the inaugural team of visiting artists of KCA’s SFW Resident Artist Program. Hailing from southeast Texas, Camille, working in several different media, wow’d audiences with her perspectives on soil health on modern agricultural farms, specifically those of Harborview Farms of Rock Hall, in partnership with owner Trey Hill.
The exhibit O-Horizon is an unedited glimpse into the process of writing a book. Austen Camille is currently working on their first manuscript, a series of poems and essays about soil health, regenerative practices and rural culture. The writing is primarily inspired by a series of interviews that Camille has been conducting with land stewards located around the upper Eastern Shore. Here, you can see the tangle of notes, drawings, objects, and experiments that collectively add up to a book. It is a complicated and interconnected process, overwhelmingly full of different life forms: fertile ground for stories to emerge from.
Throughout the life of the exhibition, viewers will be invited to interact and contribute their stories about soil and the definition of rural.
Hours for the exhibit are Wednesday – Friday from 10 am to 4 pm and Saturday from 10 am – 2 pm through March 15, 2025.
Austen Camille (Canadian-American) is a multidisciplinary artist, writer, builder and gardener. Camille primarily makes site-responsive public work that aims to both build relationships with the local environment, as well as call attention to the relationships that already exist within that environment. Camille’s work has been commissioned and exhibited in a diverse range of landscapes, from the dramatic northern Wyoming rivers to the high desert of eastern Oregon, from the rolling farmland in southern Wisconsin to the tidal estuary marshes along the Hudson River. Camille’s past projects include orchestrating an interdisciplinary conversation series across Temple University, creating and hosting a podcast called ‘Our Shared Field’ in order to bring artists into conversation with people from outside of the arts, and a collaboration between artists and oceanographers to undertake restoration work of cold water corals in the Gulf of Mexico. Camille received their MFA in Painting from the Tyler School of Art and Architecture (Temple University) in 2020.
Kent Cultural Alliance is the designated arts council for Kent County, Maryland and works to support and grow the cultural and artistic ecology of our small rural county. Serving as a pivotal piece of social infrastructure, KCA uses the arts to create opportunities for civic and social engagement across our diverse communities. www.kentculture.org
This exhibit has been created with generous support from the Kent Cultural Alliance, Campbell Foundation, Chesapeake Bay Trust, Joseph Robert Foundation and AgArts.
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