Something That's Needed

Kate Levant, BFA '06,  is sitting on the second floor of KAJE, the experimental arts not-for-profit that she and fellow SMFA alum Jacques Vidal, BFA ‘04, founded in Brooklyn's Gowanus neighborhood.

"What I'm working on is growing this organization," she says, gesturing to the open gallery space below her where exhibition designer Grace Caiazza is about to install a modular display system for a group exhibition titled "Arachnophobia." Responding to an open call for designers, Caizza was selected to conceive a space for the KAJE-curated show, which brings together work by seven artists that riffs off phobia, feared objects, and the distortion that comes with avoiding exposure to something at all costs even when it's irrational. 

It's one of dozens of interventions that KAJE has hosted since the space launched in 2018. Collaboration and community are words that sum up Levant's practice. Everything she creates is made either in dialogue with other artists or in close proximity to them. 

Her larger-than-life sculptures, which have appeared everywhere from the Susanne Hilberry Gallery in Detroit, Michigan, to the 2012 Whitney Biennial, are meant to be circled, and part of the viewing involves interacting with other viewers who are taking in the work at the same time. 

"Sculpture is a living thing in the world," Levant says. "It gives you a three-dimensional space to work in. It's a medium that makes sense to me." 

Although she sometimes creates in solitude, she enters that state of deep, silent focus in the studio only because she knows that other artists are nearby. Her toddler is in the parallel play stage of friendship right now–where kids build block towers or tinker with toys companionably next to one another without engaging directly. 

"That's typified in what I'm doing right now–this process of having created a whole structure to push experimental projects and getting with people on the edges of their practices that haven't been received in commercial avenues," she explains. 

Levant, who grew up in an industrial area of Chicago where neighbors invited her to adorn their warehouse doors with graffiti, attended an arts magnet high school. She worked as a florist assistant and, in many ways, took her first steps in sculpture by arranging stems and vines in vases and table centerpieces. 

She first found the power of creating community as a BFA student at SMFA, the school she chose because it was "a build your own path kind of place." 

"To look back at what the education there gave me, I feel like I'm gonna cry." She glances away and wipes her eyes. "You're so young. It's this insane time, and I can't imagine a more perfectly messy, funny place than SMFA. The way that the education was structured was exactly what I needed. There wasn't a big campus or dorms, but in that one building, people are just finding their people." 

She had the sense that she was part of art history — one of the waves of artists passing through the SMFA building, leaving legacies and movements for the next students to take up. "That the school is about to turn 150 years old is amazing to me."

After SMFA, Levant planted roots in Chicago and then studied sculpture at Yale.   She presented her first solo show at fellow artist Michael E. Smith's Detroit-based space, RICHRICHRICH. . Then halfway through her MFA, she prepared her first “really big show” in 2009, at Zach Feuer in Chelsea. Feuer is an SMFA alum, which felt like a full circle moment to her. 

The reception was so strong for these first shows, that Levant earned representation very early on in her career at Susanne Hilberry Gallery. 

Things were moving fast, but navigating galleries, their openings, collectors, and the market itself also created a lot of pressure. 

"There's a lot of power dynamics in the commercial market; a lot of forces there that I wasn't necessarily prepared to handle," she explains. 

For the next decade, she bounced between cities and countries nomadically, stopping wherever a commission beckoned. 

 "I was developing a body of work, flying over, making the show, communicating about it to the people who would represent the work, and then leaving and never seeing the work again." 

That way of life ended when she got sober 10 years ago. "Doing so rewired my mental and emotional circuitry. I had to sort a lot of things out," she says. "My whole way of being, including in the studio, changed." 

Levant got an SMFA Travelling Fellowship that took her to Bolivia in 2020 before COVID-19 forced her (and the rest of the world) to pause in place. That’s when she and Vidal, whom she'd become friends with years before when they both participated in the New York Studio Program as SMFA undergrads, decided to go all-in on their KAJE concept. 

They spent a year renovating the industrial building to become a proper exhibition venue, with the dream of giving other artists the freedom to stage experimental interventions that had nothing to do with the art market and getting acquired. 

The gamble paid off. In the last year, KAJE was reviewed in Frieze Magazine,  Hyperallergic, and the New York Times. Levant and Vidal have just signed a 32-year lease – a symbolic gesture of their investment in the artists and the neighborhood. 

"It's a mission we both believe in," she says. “It's something that's needed here. It's important, and I think people know it. Our artists know it. But what our work is doing is becoming legible to the local community now, too."