Installations
Cynthia creates site-specific installations that explore environmental issues and endangered ecosystems. She designs work in response to the physical space and purpose of a location. She creates poetic spaces of light and shadow that change with the time of day and angle of light. Cynthia works in cut-paper and cut-Tyvek mediums; her designs can also be translated into laser-cut metal installations.
Please contact Cynthia at cynweiss@gmail.com for information about a site-specific commission.
Murmuration/Memory
MCBA Outlook Gallery 2022
Painted and cut-Tyvek, 3 x 14 ft.
This installation honors the Mississippi River flyway with images of Sandhill Cranes migrating over White Oak, American Elm, and Tulip Poplar trees.
It celebrates the adaptive practice of silviculture that sustains old and new forest growth along the Mississippi.
Mismatch
New Editions Exhibition 2019
Hyde Park Art Center HPAC
Silkscreen prints and cut-Tyvek banners
The HPAC New Editions program invites artists to expand their art practice into new mediums. Cynthia chose silkscreen printing to explore multiple ways to work with layered images.
She was intrigued by the registration process, and an intentional mis-registration, as a metaphor for the idea of environmental mismatch—the mis-timing that occurs when animals and birds return to their annual breeding grounds to find that the food sources they have relied upon have been disastrously altered by climate change.
Migration
Cynthia has created work inspired the fraught journey of the Monarch butterfly from Mexico to the United States and back again. These installations also honor immigrants and refugees making their dangerous journeys in search of sanctuary and better lives.
Risk/Awe
Convergence: The Poetic Dialogue Project 2015
curated by Beth Shadur at the Ukrainian Institute of Modern Art
Created in dialogue with poet Margaret Rozga, in response to her poem Risk/Awe.
Painted & cut-Tyvek 6 x 8 ft.
Migration
Prudential Building lobby, Chicago 2015
curated by Susan Arinko
Painted & cut-Tyvek 24 x 8 ft.
Photo Credit: Aidan Fitzpatrick
The Space Between
Egrets Collective
People’s Church, Uptown Chicago 2016
Leah Mayers, Jamie Thome, Claire Rabkin, and Cynthia began this site-specific exhibit at Uptown’s People’s Church by generating words inspired by the well-worn balcony space. They each designed separate work to be installed between the pews, rafters, and windows.
This is Cynthia’s contribution.
Between Here and There
Center Program Exhibit
Hyde Park Art Center 2013
Painted and Cut-paper installation.
10 x 10 ft.
Luchadores Por Justicia
Ricardo X Serment and Cynthia Weiss
MAKING TOGETHER, Hyde Park Art Center
Installed at Pilsen Art and Community House 2020
Painted and cut banners. 15 x 8 ft.
The artists worked from Ricardo’s images of luchadores, (wrestler figures rooted in Mexican folklore, myth, and tradition) as a point of departure and inspiration. They created a window installation that honored modern day luchadores—essential health care and agricultural workers, and teachers on the front lines of the pandemic.
The Right to the Shoreline
Chicago Public Art Group
Evanston Art Center 2022
Artists Sonja Henderson and Cynthia Weiss were commissioned to create a visual response to the report, The Right to the Shoreline: Race, Exclusion, and Public Beaches in Metropolitan Chicago, by Samuel Kling and Lucas Stephens, for the Chicago Council of Global Affairs.
ART-IN-PLACE
Installed at CLK Management, Bryn Mawr Ave. Chicago 2020
ART-IN-PLACE is a collaboration between CNL Projects and Terrain Exhibitions
Field Studies
Ragdale Artist Residency 2017
Prairie Studio installation
Painted and cut-Tyvek 30 x 8 ft.