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The exhibition “End Game” is a collaboration with artist Abe Kimball, Youth Care Arts, and SpyHop. The Youth Care Arts program is a diverse group of artists, educators, and therapists, organized to provide social practice art projects as an experiential record and bridge between youth in care and Utah communities. They facilitate interactive community art projects in detention centers, rehabilitation centers, and group homes for youth typically in the state’s custody. “End Game” is part of Granary Arts ongoing Artist & Community collaborative projects in the CCA Christiansen cabin gallery.

“End Game” is a visual record of work from contributing youth in care throughout the state of Utah. Youth chose and decorated chess pieces resembling three characters in their life: the self, the familiar, and the other. Chess pieces were then given color and personality beyond the common binary of black and white. The age-old game of chess encourages resilience and use of strategy. It reminds viewers about choice and action while considering positions of power and glory, and asks viewers to recognize our choices and actions during loss, when others are progressing. Everyone is compelled to consider their end game. Youth in care participants collaborated on this project and their insights are visible within the work. Viewers are invited to respond to the same questions in this interactive installation. 

About the Curator
Abe Kimball is the Art Director of the Youth Care Arts program and serves and works with the North Sanpete Arts Council. He is currently teaching at North Sanpete Middle School and Snow College, and received an MFA in art and anthropology from Brigham Young University. He has been entrenched in the arts since a small child, watching his artist father work in lithography. As an artist, Abe describes the dimensions of his art as bipolar; much of his time is absorbed in the flat world of printmaking, the other part in the dizzying world of social practice installations. He favors the work of Surrealists and Dadaists, but his compositions are more like a fictitious chronicle of vintage peoples and their obsolete technologies. He sees his task, as addressing cultural leftovers, he says, “better than anything else, our stuff suggests our attitudes about how we relate to the world.” He currently resides with his wife and children in the rural township of Indianola, Utah.