Krasl Art Center presents a new interdisciplinary installation by Bella Kiser in the Project Space, expanding her ongoing exploration of soft architecture, a practice that uses soft sculpture and participation to consider how identity and experience shape ideas of home.
Kiser is a mixed-race Filipino American artist from Chicago, IL, currently based in Detroit, MI. She is a graduate of Tufts University and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts Combined Degree Program, where she received a BFA in Studio Art and a BS in Environmental Studies. Throughout her practice, she works with wearables, textiles, and immersive environments to construct what she describes as fabritecture, a malleable, ever-changing building system shaped by sensory and emotional experience. Her work engages questions of identity, otherness, comfort, and discomfort, as well as critiques of American productivity culture, while foregrounding the physical conditions of lived experience.
In this exhibition, Kiser also draws from the form of the Balikbayan Box, a package sent by overseas Filipinos to family back in the Philippines, as a conceptual reference point for thinking about container, care, distance, and return. Through soft sculpture and audience interaction, she builds environments that invite bodily experience, informing the interpretation of the work.
Other exhibition related events:
PUBLIC PREVIEW PARTY
Friday, August 14, 2026
6 - 8 PM
ARTIST TALK: BELLA KISER
Saturday, August 15, 2026
12 - 1 PM
Thursday, August 20, 2026
12 - 1 PM
CLASS OFFERINGS: APPROACHES TO CONTEMPORARY PAINTING
Instructors: Meli Bandera, Tami Fauver, and Nathan Margoni
(5) Tuesdays, 6 - 7 PM, September 1 - 29.
For more information regarding the exhibitions, visit www.krasl.org.
