Presented during BAM’s Free First Friday, Cut Up/Cut Out artist Amy Oates invites visitors to play with light, shadow, pattern, and space through a live, interactive drawing program. Focusing on the idea that, “we make this city,” the artist and visitors will work together to add sketches, doodles, patterns, and text to form individual pieces that contribute to a larger, collective crowd. Appropriate for all ages. Free to all.

About Amy Oates

Amy Oates is fascinated by the way individuals interact in negotiations between public and personal space. Oates finds that our cities—those static dots on the map—are formed, altered, and sustained by anonymous persons, fleeting moments, rubbed shoulders, blocked views, stuffy spaces, converging paths, diverging destinations, what is given, and what is taken. Her work explores the “crowd” as a singular unit, representative of ephemeral moments captured in time where individuals come together to create something new, abstract, and larger than themselves. To create her work, Oates spends a lot of time in crowds. In her daily encounters traveling in and commuting around cities, she observes the way people interact and use space. She sketches and takes photographs for source materials looking for individuals with interesting movements or shapes. After drawing, she cuts out the negative space with an X-Acto knife. Installations are made up of several layers of paper that Oates arranges into a composition and strings together so they can hang freely. After growing up on a tiny island outside of a big city in Florida, Amy Oates slowly made her way west, first studying art at Baylor University, then cutting her chops in Seattle’s art scene, and currently residing and creating in Oakland, California. She has participated in gallery exhibitions and temporary public commissions in Washington, California, and Texas; curated multidisciplinary arts events; and invested into youth development through afterschool arts programs. Oates’ work explores negotiated processes of growth, change, and movement in both social and natural phenomena, in subjects ranging from urban crowds to coral reefs. She primarily works in painting, printmaking, and cut paper installation, and finds that investing into communities through the arts is an integral part of her artistic practice