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The Delicate Boldness of Mimi Czajka Graminski

When Mimi C. Graminski works in her Red Hook, New York, studio she enters the instinctive creative space where she explores endless possibilities, sometimes with conscious ideas, other times on free-flowing auto-pilot. After a lifetime devoted to her art, the process itself is an integral essence of her being, a natural part of her humanity. Since early childhood she has painted, drawn and made sculptures, working with her hands, getting into that space she calls “the state of flow.” The daughter of upstate New York dairy farmers, and the granddaughter of immigrants from Poland and Sicily, always “loved making beautiful things.” She eventually took a Bachelor of Arts from Bard College, an experience she now recognizes as male-dominated. “There was only one female teacher and role model”, she recalled, “I left there and needed to find my own voice.” She found that voice!

Graminski works with a variety of materials to create installation art, finding inspiration by exploring limitless ideas, forms and media. Installation art, simply said, is the creation of work in site-specific three-dimensional interior or outside spaces, when an artist puts something with something else. A new spatial environment emerges, both on the conceptual and community level.

Each of Graminski’s creative projects is a juxtaposition of paradoxical pairings, an expression of beauty by combining inanimate things and bringing them to life, indeed to let them dance. She took old pieces of lace and united them with logs of wood, for example. She takes something massive and pairs it with the most delicate and light. She finds objects and, in the right moment in time, takes these things of the world, the seemingly opposite that exist in the same space, and she uses them as forms of emotional expression. The resulting clash between strength and fragility yields a new object, as the artist pushed herself, releasing something that seems to have been bottled up inside. All of her installations seemingly follow the same free approach. She finds the beauty in things, and takes them to a dance in a fluid swirl, until new objects emerge with a new lightness of being. Some part is vision, the rest is chance. As she said, “Letting the art take me wherever it wants to go.” The result is vast freedom and vivid playfulness. Movement flows out of her art. You sense not just the persistence of sensuality, the human interaction with textures, colors, shapes, light and shadow, but also of the engaging mind joining that dance. The viewer’s senses are transformed and immersed in the feeling of the moment. Graminski instantly evokes a high level of intimacy between her art and the viewer. Her work is not merely a precious object to be looked at, but it becomes a presence that evokes a mood or a feeling. The art engages viewers in new ways. Beyond that, no verbal categorization fits, no explanation is needed, nor would it matter. You look at it and feel it.

Like many artists, Graminski is obsessed with the creative process as an existential part of her life. “I have to do it. It’s my calling. I love the space, the state of flow. I love creating. I sometimes think of my studio as a laboratory where I collect specimens of different materials- lace, mesh bags from vegetables, translucent fabric and combine them in different ways, ‘playing’ with them until they resolve into a piece.”