Manifesting Presence
Yvonne Petkus | Kristina Arnold | Leslie Nichols​
Artists Kristina Arnold, Leslie Nichols, and Yvonne Petkus come together in Manifesting Presence, an exhibition exploring the ways in which they as individual artists and as a collective hold space – and how biological, psychological, historical, and social environments shape this process. Arnold, Nichols, and Petkus began a group called the Critique Collective in Bowling Green, Kentucky six years ago. This will be their first time exhibiting as that collective. From large, wall-sized installations to intimately scaled works on paper, Manifesting Presence will include Arnold’s installations of cast glass, mixed fiber media, paper, and ink, Nichols’ text-based works created with tools including manual typewriters and a letterpress printing press, and Petkus’ sculptural paintings on plexiglass, mylar, panel, and canvas.
Kristina Arnold
Kristina Arnold is an artist and educator living and working in Bowling Green, Kentucky. Her practice combines an undergraduate degree and work in community health with a graduate degree in painting, professional museum / gallery experience, and a life-long dedication to activism. Materializing in two, three and four dimensions, Arnold’s work ranges from making pieces that question current societal understandings about health and wellness and suggest alternative paradigms, to producing projects that more specifically direct desired outcomes. Arnold has been an Emerging Artist in Residence at Pilchuck Glass School, and an artist in residence at the Jentel Artist Residency Program in Banner, Wyoming and the Municipal Gallery in Bratislava, Slovakia.

Leslie Nichols 
Leslie Nichols is an American artist known for her works created on manual typewriters which are featured in Typewriter Art: A Modern Anthology and The Art of Typewriting. Her experimental letterpress printing started with an NEA Studio Residency Grant at Women’s Studio Workshop and the Second Edition of For the Love of Letterpress features one of her first editioned prints. Additional grants supporting her work are from the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation, AAUW, Kentucky Foundation for Women, and the Great Meadows Foundation. Selected collections featuring her work include Yale University, the Library of Congress, and the Sackner Archive of Concrete and Visual Poetry. Her studio is in Bowling Green, Kentucky where she teaches at Southcentral Kentucky Community and Technical College.

Yvonne Petkus
Originally from New Jersey, artist Yvonne Petkus is committed to a discourse of ideas through teaching (Western Kentucky University) and through a range of national and international exhibitions and lectures. Honors include awards from the Kentucky Arts Council, the Kentucky Foundation for Women, and the Great Meadows Foundation, as well as artist residencies in Vermont, New York, and Iceland. Her process-driven work responds to cultural inputs and research, including through a recent fellowship in Bosnia-Herzegovina, which resulted in a solo exhibition at Moremen/Moloney Gallery in Louisville, Kentucky, a two-person exhibit with photojournalist James Kenney at the Downing Museum, and her curatorial project, Proof of Existence, an international exhibition of work by twelve Bosnian and Balkan artists. Throughout her varied roles, Petkus has seen the power that artwork has to give voice, to challenge, and to connect; and uses her work and work with other artists to provide the space, discourse, and material evidence of that power.