Meet Carole Kunstadt | Visual Artist

We had the good fortune of connecting with Carole Kunstadt and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Carole, why did you decide to pursue a creative path?
I have always been interested in art. My parents encouraged the artistic talents of both myself and my sister.. We were never idle. We were always drawing, painting and making things—embroidering, sewing, and later macramé. Art was central to what we did.. I have always been greatly satisfied making/creating something from nothing. During high school, Saturdays were spent in classes at the Mass College of Art and the Boston Museum School, where I had placed in junior and senior award programs. I was the first in my family to attend a B.F.A. program, studying at the Hartford Art School in Hartford, CT.

Can you open up a bit about your work and career? We’re big fans and we’d love for our community to learn more about your work.
The accumulated ephemera of my life started to appear in my work—receipts, tickets, stamps and found natural objects such as feathers, which I then combined with handmade papers. A small but inspiring exhibition of Anne Ryan collages at the Met was an early influence. In 2006 I chanced on the methods and materials that have sustained me up to the present. I found a collection of psalms and hymns for public worship, published in 1844, in a used bookstore for about $25 and worked with its pages for three years. I used it up and then searched online to get a second volume. Even though it was the same title, it was different. The resulting work was both additive and reductive, as I was moving into weaving and gilding and layering. The material qualities of the second book pushed me into doing more sculptural pieces.

Ever since then I have used books/bookplates/manuscripts from previous centuries, oftentimes combining bits of text with antique artifacts..
“In Kunstadt’s hands, books are broken down and transformed, phoenix-like, into new shapes that encompass the original meaning of the words while transcending them. The re-purposed forms reveal a previously undisclosed essence within the books. They also create new stories out of the antique objects, unlocking the physical potential latent in the pages.”

Let’s say your best friend was visiting the area and you wanted to show them the best time ever. Where would you take them? Give us a little itinerary – say it was a week long trip, where would you eat, drink, visit, hang out, etc.
The Hudson Valley is incredibly rich in art and natural beauty. The city of Hudson, named after the river’s explorer Henry Hudson is a great place to explore galleries, restaurants, and furniture stores, many of which relocated from NYC’s Soho.
Olana State Historic Site is a historic house museum and landscape near the city of Hudson, NY. The estate was home to Frederic Edwin Church, one of the major figures in the Hudson River School of landscape painting. He designed the house, set high above the Hudson River.
Across the river in Catskill is the home of Thomas Cole, environmentalist/painter, mentor of Church, and originator of the Hudson River School of landscape painting.
For natural beauty – Kaaterskill Falls is a two-drop waterfall located in the eastern Catskill Mountains, Hunter, NY. The dual cascades total 260 feet, making it one of the higher waterfalls in NY and of the Eastern US. The waterfalls are one of America’s oldest tourist attractions, being depicted or described by many books, essays, poems and paintings of the early 19th century. Beginning with Thomas Cole’s first visit during 1825, they became a subject for painters of the Hudson River School, setting the wilderness ideal for American landscape painting.
Opus 40 is a large environmental sculpture in Saugerties, New York, created by sculptor and quarryman Harvey Fite over a 37 year period. It comprises a sprawling series of dry-stone ramps, pedestals and platforms covering 6.5 acres of a bluestone quarry. Fite hand-sculpted Opus 40 entirely from bluestone harvested on site, fusing the legacy of local quarrying and ancient Mayan and Aztec stonework learned through his travels. He framed his stonework sculpture with the surrounding woods and mountains, ensuring the local ecosystem would always be central to the impact of this Natural Historic Register site.
Storm King Art Center, named after its proximity to Storm King Mountain, is an open-air museum located in New Windsor, New York. It contains what is perhaps the largest collection of contemporary outdoor sculptures in the United States – a 500-acre outdoor museum where visitors experience large-scale sculpture and site-specific commissions under open sky.

The Shoutout series is all about recognizing that our success and where we are in life is at least somewhat thanks to the efforts, support, mentorship, love and encouragement of others. So is there someone that you want to dedicate your shoutout to?
I was fortunate to be encouraged throughout my life by significant art teachers. The first being the town art teacher, who lived up the street and opened her house to a few kids for after-school classes. She had a Revolutionary-era home, filled with antiques and collectibles, and from this diverse and intriguing menagerie we could pick whatever we wanted to draw or paint. It was freeing and empowering. At the time, that was a pretty forward-thinking attitude—that a child could choose the subject matter and the media. My unique eye was given the space and encouragement to explore and experiment. This was fortifying then and has remained important to me. Years later when I was choosing an elementary school for my sons, finding a program that had respect and encouragement for the individual voice was central to my selection for them.       

Website: https://carolekunstadt.com

Instagram: @ckunstadt

Linkedin: Carole P. Kunstadt

Facebook: Carole Kunstadt

Image Credits
Kevin Kunstadt, Robert Hansen-Sturm, Carole Kunstadt