Please join us on Saturday, September 27th at 2pm for a conversation between John Michael Kohler Arts Center's Assistant Curator Chava Krivchenia and artist Ashwini Bhat as they discuss the sublime and resonant new body of work by Bhat, The Morning After The Fire Swept Through. Chava Krivchenia is a curator and writer and serves as the Assistant Curator at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center (Sheboygan, WI). With a professional and academic background in ecology and art history, her research and curatorial practices stem from ecological dynamics, discard studies, material studies, and natural histories. She prioritizes working with contemporary artists to support the making of new and experimental bodies of work, focusing on assemblage sculpture, site-specific, environmental, and installation art. She has curated the exhibitions Ashwini Bhat: Reverberating Self (2025); Watts Towers in Focus (2025); Willie Cole: Home Assembly (2024); No Grout (2024); Workplace (Artists: Billy Dufala, John Greig, and Martha Poggioli) (2024); Bea Fremderman: Weeds Compared to Flowers (2023); Patricia Piccinini: encounters of another plot (2023); Eccentric Machines (2022); among others. She co-curated A Beautiful Experience: The Midwest Grotto Tradition (2025) and Otis Houston Jr: My Name is My Word (2022) with Curator Laura Bickford. She co-curated Lunch Break: Arts/Industry in Between (2024) with Chief Curator Jodi Throckmorton. She co-curated Clocking In: 2024 Arts/Industry Residents (Artists Cathy Hsiao, Harold Mendez, Sahar Khoury, Martha Poggioli, and Edra Soto) (2024) and Mad Dash (2024) with Curator Laura Bickford and Associate Curator Tanya Gayer. Before her current position, Krivchenia worked at Black Mountain College Museum and Arts Center (Asheville, NC) as a Windgate Fellow; Intuit: The Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art (Chicago); and several other contemporary art galleries and artist-run spaces. Krivchenia earned her MA in Contemporary and Modern Art History from the School of the Art Institute Chicago (2020). Ashwini Bhat, after thirty-five years in Southern India, multidisciplinary artist now lives and works in the foothills of Sonoma Mountain, California. Coming from a background in literature and classical Indian dance, Bhat creates installations using bronze and ceramic sculptures, video, and text, to develop a unique visual language exploring the intersections between body and nature, self and other. Her work—with its ecofeminist undertones—shows the influence of syncretic shrines, rituals, and non-Western metaphysical concepts of empathy for the more-than-human. Bhat is a 2024 John S. Knudsen Prize winner from the Crocker Art Museum and a 2023 United States Artists fellow. She has also received the Howard Foundation Award for Sculpture and the McKnight Foundation Residency Fellowship. Her sculptures are exhibited nationally and internationally and can be seen in collections at the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco, Crocker art Museum, University of Michigan Museum of Art, Newport Art Museum (USA); Kiran Nadar Museum of Art (India); Shigaraki Ceramic Cultural Park (Japan); FuLe International Ceramic Art Museum (China); and in many private collections. Her work has been widely reviewed and featured in Hyperallergic, BOMB Magazine, Dovetail Mag, Art and Cake, Los Angeles Review of Books, Bay Nature, PinUp Magazine, New City Mag, American Craft Council, Alta Journal, Brooklyn Rail, Lana Turner: a Journal of Poetry and Opinion, and Riot Material. Bhat is a certified Naturalist at the Osborne Preserve, a research site for Sonoma State University’s Center for Environmental Inquiry. Currently Bhat’s work can be seen in her first early mid career survey exhibition Ashwini Bhat: Reverberating Self, at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center, in Wisconsin; a permanent installation, Ashwini Bhat: What Will It Take, For Us To Awake? at the Asian Art Museum San Francisco; a site-responsive solo installation, Being, Longing… at the Palo Alto Art Center, and in group exhibitions at the San Jose Museum of Art and Montalvo Art Center. Image: Ashwini Bhat "Self Portrait as My Mother (2)," 2025