Patrick Kikut

April 11, 2025 – March 28, 2026

Friends & Chicago Galleries

Patrick Kikut’s art is rooted in his love for the landscapes of the American West and his drive to continue exploring them. Kikut served as the lead artist on the Sesquicentennial Colorado River Exploring Expedition (SCREE), launching out of Green River, Wyoming, on May 24, 2019 – one-hundred-fifty years to the day after the famous explorer John Wesley Powell undertook a similar journey. The watercolors and large-scale oil paintings on view reveal the progression of Kikut’s artistic process, and provide a visual journey down the Colorado River, amplified by the presence of one of the 18-foot rafts employed on the SCREE trip. On this expedition, artists and scientists lived and worked in proximity with each other, harmonizing and coordinating efforts to ensure safe and successful navigation through long and sometimes treacherous expanses of river. The resulting cacophony of images creates a shared visual vocabulary. Once used to document and prove the existence of land, resources, and vistas, today, these images continue to reify places. Kikut’s landscapes, created as a result of this intense interaction with nature and other collaborators, are inherently and necessarily an act of sympoiesis, of making-with.

Take a visual journey down the Colorado River

Image: Installation view of Patrick Kikut’s installation at the University of Wyoming Art Museum. All artworks on loan from the artist. AIRE 183R raft and other items that were taken on the 2019 SCREE trip are on loan from Jessica Flock.

 

Funded through the generosity of the Susan Moldenhauer FUNd for Contemporary Art, the Patricia R. Guthrie Special Exhibitions Gallery Endowment, WE Soda, and By Western Hands.

 

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Installation view of Patrick Kikut’s installation, a green raft from the SCREE expedition in the foreground

March 26, 2026 – Film Screening and Panel Conversation

On Thursday, March 26 at 5:30 p.m., join visiting artist Patrick Kikut for a film screening of A River Out of Time, followed by a panel conversation with the artist and Jessica Flock (Pedal House), Jason Robison (College of Law) and Thomas Minckley (Department of Geology and Geophysics). Reception at 5:30 p.m. with film screening and panel conversation to follow at 6 p.m. This event will take place at the UW Art Museum and is free and open to the public.

March 27, 2026 – Lunchtime Conversation

On Friday, March 27 at 12 p.m., visiting artist Patrick Kikut will host a Lunchtime Conversation in the galleries, offering visitors an opportunity to engage directly with the artist's work in Sympoiesis: Co-Creating Sense of Place, and learn more about his creative process. This event is free and open to the public.

March 28, 2026 – Artmaking Workshop

On Saturday, March 28 at 1 p.m., visiting artist Patrick Kikut will lead a hands-on field drawing workshop inspired by themes from his work in Sympoiesis: Co-Creating Sense of Place. Participants will join Kikut in the galleries for an introduction and gallery talk, followed by location scouting and sketching for inspiration, and returning to the UW Art Museum studio for a hands on watercolor workshop.