At Centennial College, we help prepare you to turn your passion into a career, and this includes students of the arts. Kai Hart is a graduate of our Fine Arts program, who managed to take what he had learned at college and turn it into a beautiful series of abstract art pieces called Urban Grit, which were recently featured in a solo exhibit at the Leslie Grove Gallery in Toronto. Here’s what got him into art, and how he went from student to exhibiting artist.
Changing lanes
Before he was an artist, Kai went to school to learn to be a teacher, and even worked in a private school for five years, before deciding that it wasn’t for him.
“I chose to step away from it and pursue the arts,” he says, “and actually thought I was going to go into product design. I was looking at that at Centennial, because that was a brand-new program. But I decided to go into the fundamentals program, and Centennial just always seemed right for me.”
Kai would first come to Centennial to take Art and Design Fundamentals, a one-year program that outlines the different art paths you could take.
“That’s pretty unique to Centennial,” he says about the program. “There are other fundamentals programs, but Centennial has a very intensive one. It covers sculpture, fine art, digital, everything.”
After that, he enrolled in Centennial’s Fine Arts Studio program, which runs for two years. “Unlike other programs, we have a lot of time in the studio,” he says about the program. “That's what really attracted me to Centennial, because it's not a whole lot of being on your computer doing theory, you actually produce art and go into the studio and keep producing art, which is very different from other programs. Our slogan was: Get your hands dirty.”
“In the Fine Arts Studio program, we do have community-based assignments,” Kai adds, talking about the practical experience. “My group in particular, we went into a senior's home and did a mural there, a mosaic mural at the west end. So you're really also learning about being an artist within the community.”
How the College prepared him
“When I originally started to go to college, I thought being an artist was really about big ideas,” Kai says. “Big ideas will come, and then you'll do big things. Then, as I started working professionally, after I graduated, I realized how isolating it is and how much perseverance you need to be an artist, and no one's really telling you what to do.”
“No one's checking in on you at school, right?” He explains. “You're just kind of alone. And you don't really have that feedback. So what I really learned at the college that became true later on, was, you have to put in the work. And then the ideas and everything else will follow.”
An unexpected journey
Kai graduated from Centennial College in 2019, and immediately travelled across Canada just for himself. Upon his return he had an art residency in Toronto, but then the COVID-19 pandemic hit, which would inadvertently start his journey to the solo exhibit.
“I gave myself a project, where I did these little paintings in my little room that I was renting in Toronto,” he explains. “And then it just kind of went from there.”
He’d move to Winnipeg in 2020, and work in his studio in the mornings, incorporating photos of concrete and construction into what he was making.
“I felt so lost in the pandemic, especially in the arts, when everything's closed,” he says. “And I couldn't really talk to anyone. So it was just me and my studio.”
“So I started doing these paintings, Urban Grit,” he says. “They're really about perseverance, having the attention to keep going and not give up, having that grit in these very strange times, when things are changing by the day, by the week, by the hour, you don't know. And that became really important to me to have something more uplifting; something that was productive for me to do as an artist, but also, for people to see that anything is possible if you work for it."
Going solo
Kai made it a goal to show off his art in a solo exhibition, and it would turn out that connections he’d made while at Centennial would help make it happen.
“I applied to Leslie Grove Gallery after they put up a proposal for exhibitions,” he explains. “In the Fine Arts program, we exhibited in Leslie Grove for our second year graduating show. So I knew some people in the gallery already, and I was applying to different things because I really wanted to show these works as a solo exhibition. I applied and actually got it! I didn't think I would!” The end result: His Urban Grit exhibit is on display there now.
Advice for his Fellow Artists
“I would probably say, don’t listen to most advice,” Kai says. “There really is no right way or wrong way to be a visual artist, you just kind of have to follow your own path. Some people do galleries, some people do completely digital, and they do sales that way. You just really need to find what you want, and follow that passion and that instinct.”
“Look at artists that you're jealous of,” he adds. “I think that's a big one for me. I use jealousy as a compass sometimes, that's what I want to do. And I kind of see what they're doing and how they're doing it. And so you build your own visual language and way of doing things.”
“I consider my art mentor to be one of my teachers that's been helping me out,” he says. “That's really important, to have other artists around you that believe in what you do. So you're not so isolated. Just finding that community is really critical, especially when you're just starting out.”
Urban Grit will be on display at the Leslie Grove Gallery until June 19th. You can also view Kai Hart’s art on his Instagram page, @kaihart.art.
By: Anthony Geremia