Charlotte Art Professors “Obsessed” With Kelp
From the moment art professors Maja Godlewska and Marek Ranis joined the Art and Action in the Pacific Ocean creative cohort, they knew they were outsiders. Organized by Cassandra Coblentz, former curator at the Orange County Museum of Art in California, the project draws together artists from the Pacific Rim whose work engages those waters. As natives of Poland and longtime Charlotte residents, the two “were really oddballs from the beginning,” said Godlewska.
But both artists have demonstrated time and again their abilities to connect deeply to a place and a cause, sometimes devoting years to research and relationship-building in faraway lands as they create work that reflects the depth of their discoveries.
Godlewska, for example, has spent stretches of time in Tasmania, on the island of Mauritius, and traveling to national parks throughout the United States, developing multiple series of large-scale paintings, mixed-media canvases, and works on paper. Ranis has more than two decades of work in the Arctic North, with residencies in Iceland, Greenland, Alaska, and Norway, and a multifaceted body of artworks that consider how climate change is affecting that vast region.
So when Coblentz approached Ranis after hearing him present at a conference about climate change and subsequently invited the two artists (they are husband and wife) to participate in Transformative Currents: Art and Action in the Pacific Ocean, they began by going to southern California to not only research the land and sea, but more importantly, to learn about the conservation efforts that are underway.