PHOTO CREDIT: Charles Bouril
a creature who is aware of joy and despair and everything in between
Katharine Joy Houpt
August 14 - September 25 , 2026
Opening Reception: August 14th 2026, 6:00 PM – 9:00 PM
"Katharine Joy Houpt’s solo show: 30-foot quilted anthropomorphic creature and dreams"
Katharine Joy Houpt conjures Chicago Imagists in the anthropomorphic form of a 30 foot quilted creature in the windows of Co-Propsperity Sphere, in a creature who is aware of joy and despair and everything in between, opening August 14th. Houpt’s first solo show sprawls the windows of the gallery, involving the building itself in the body of work’s cosmic darkness and delight.
In this solo show, artist Katharine Joy Houpt engages in a slow, expressive fiber arts process to create an absurdly large anthropomorphic creature and its dreams and memories, split into ten quilted panels. The work examines embodiment of subjectivity within an environment, a peek into a creature’s inner world within outer world constraints. The artist created the site-specific work for this show with the form of the building in mind, and allowed the materials including found and reused fabrics to intuitively inform who the creature has become. Katharine draws on the aesthetic tradition of Chicago Imagists, combined with fiber arts techniques including improvised quilting, free-motion quilting, appliqué, trapunto, and embroidery, to mirror the joy and the struggle of creating in a world that can hold incredible awe, humor, delight, disappointment, sadness, and rage all at once. This work is about attempting to curiously pay attention to all of it, and the imaginative impact of that awareness and unawareness on a body.
Artist Biography:
Katharine Joy Houpt is a Chicago mixed media artist working in fiber arts, collage, and drawing to create uncanny and absurd imagery. She engages in slow, process oriented techniques that allow for improvisation and emergence of the unexpected, aiming for a balance between delight and darkness. She has a BA from the Evergreen State College and an MA in Art Therapy from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC). Katharine taught as part-time faculty at SAIC for ten years. This is her first solo show.