Carolyn Mary Kleefeld – Contact Us
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By awarding them the Rising Creator label, Facebook recognizes creators whose content receives high audience engagement. This title is given weekly to creators demonstrating strong audience engagement while maintaining quality, originality, and integrity for their content. Recently, Carolyn Mary Kleefeld received this award for the third time. Carolyn shares her latest poetry, artwork, exciting news, and profiles of brilliant thinkers on her Facebook page. She invites you to subscribe to her Facebook page and follow her creative journey online.
We are happy to announce Carolyn’s third exhibition at the Carolyn Campagna Kleefeld Contemporary Art Museum, Cosmic Connections, which is drawn from their collection of her works. This exhibition includes several of the artist’s large abstract paintings, taken from multiple series, and related drawings made in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
As Carolyn increasingly identified as a poet and visual artist, she began to create abstract, gestural works referencing the landscape and the cosmos. Two bodies of work, Cosmic Connections and Landscape Abstractions, reflect her deepening understanding of the position within what she calls “the flow.” Recognizing herself as a creative being within a larger natural universe, Carolyn’s work from this period expresses her continuing exploration of spiritual movements and consciousness-expansive practices. Including the most representative works from this period in her oeuvre, Cosmic Connections will remain on view through 2024.
We invite you to visit the Kleefeld Contemporary located at 1250 North Bellflower Boulevard in Long Beach, CA 90840. Or you can visit the museum’s website to view collections and exhibitions.
Carolyn Campagna Kleefeld Contemporary Art Museum presents Carolyn’s newest exhibition, On Top of a Mountain, which opened on February 7 and will run through December 2023. The exhibition showcases her works from her Northern California home where she has welcomed friends, creatives, and thought leaders for decades.
In her journals, she describes her studio as situated “on top of a mountain”, and has inspired this selection of works. Her way of living is organized around sustained engagement with nature, love, solitude, writing and visual art making, and a rejection of market values and consumerism. Always inspired by life, the art on view is part of the artist’s large gift to the Museum.
Some of Carolyn’s paintings and drawings in the exhibition.
Left to Right: Cosmic Energy Beams, Cosmic Stage Over the Rocks, Circus Icon, I Receive Planetary Guidance, and World Catastrophes.
California State University, Long Beach
After nearly two years of construction, Cal State Long Beach’s newly renovated and expanded Carolyn Campagna Kleefeld Contemporary Art Museum, formerly known as the University Art Museum, is just days away from welcoming guests once again.
“After two years of working to expand and transform our museum, we are overjoyed to welcome our communities to experience our arts complex, new exhibitions and more,” CSULB museum director Paul Baker Prindle said. “We are very excited to advance our focus on visual abstraction, material innovation and arts integration and offer improved access to our collection as an educational resource that is owned by all Californians.”
The museum will open to the public on Saturday, presenting an entirely new concept in appearance and purpose since its founding in 1973. Notably, the museum is bigger. Much, much bigger. Four thousand square feet were added to the museum since construction began in June 2020, more than doubling the exhibit space.
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California State University, Long Beach
UPDATE: Cal State Long Beach has made the decision to postpone the Opening Reception and Unveiling of the Carolyn Campagna Kleefeld Contemporary Art Museum due to state and local Covid-19 protocols and safety considerations for the public and students. We will announce any new events associated with the opening.
We are excited to celebrate the new redesigned Carolyn Campagna Kleefeld Contemporary Art Museum complex that introduces fresh attractions and features, including several new galleries and public spaces. Now transformed, the Museum can better serve visitors with more accessible upgraded facilities, inclusive policies, and multi-use spaces that make the only free museum in Long Beach welcoming for everyone. Visitors of all ages can soon experience free programs in exhibition spaces, an Education Laboratory, native and water-wise plant gardens, a refreshed Patron’s Plaza, and a broadened public art park and landscape with even more sculptural works. Unprecedented collection access, a new museum store with Cal State Long Beach alumni-crafted functional art, and flexible spaces for research and learning opportunities offer something for everyone to enjoy.
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Her words provoke and inspire. Her highly acclaimed paintings express in symbolic imagery the passions of the heart and a reverence for the wilderness. It’s this quest for creative experimentation and spiritual knowledge that has made Carolyn Campagna Kleefeld an award-winning poet, writer, visual artist, and now benefactor to the University Art Museum and College of the Arts at Cal State Long Beach.
Kleefeld, whose paintings have appeared in numerous museums and galleries around the world, has gifted 120 of her works to launch what she and the university expect to be a long and fruitful partnership. Her vast portfolio includes an extensive and diverse body of paintings and drawings, ranging in style from Expressionist to Abstract to Figurative.
Kleefeld’s award-winning art is in the permanent collections of – among others – The Downey Museum of Art, Pepperdine University’s Frederick R. Weisman Art Museum, The Henry Miller Memorial Library in Big Sur and The Dylan Thomas Theatre in Swansea, Wales.
“Carolyn’s impact on California art has been nothing short of remarkable and we are delighted that the University Art Museum will be part of her lasting legacy, as well as provide us with the opportunity to showcase her work and that of other significant artists,” said President Jane Close Conoley.
Kleefeld was born in Catford, England, but grew up in Southern California. She studied art and psychology at UCLA. In 1980, she moved to her current home in Big Sur, California, where she studies, writes and paints.
She is the author of 20 books, a number of which have been used by healing centers and universities. Kleefeld’s writings have been translated into over 15 languages. Her book, “Climates of the Mind,” was translated into Braille and has been used in psychology courses at Cal State Long Beach. Kleefeld’s literary and personal archive, as well as a complete set of her published books will join her gift of artwork at the museum.
“A profound circle has magically manifested,” said Kleefeld of the new relationship with the university. “When my parents, S. Mark and Amelia Taper, came to this country from England with my brother, sister, and myself, we first stayed for some time at the Biltmore Hotel in Long Beach, and later my father began his extensive housing for veterans there. So, now for my life’s work to be part of the Long Beach community is a destiny fulfilled.”
Cyrus Parker-Jeannette, dean of the College of the Arts, is delighted at the addition of the Kleefeld Collection to the University Art Museum.
“The University Art Museum seeks to serve our students in ways that expand their understanding of the complex roles that art plays in culture,” Parker-Jeannette said. “It means so much to us that Carolyn’s legacy as an artist, a poet, and a historical figure will be celebrated here, and I am happily foreseeing that many great opportunities will emerge from this relationship.”
“As I express in my artist statement, ultimately art is an innocent interactive mirror of my innermost process, whisking me out of time into the Timeless,” said Kleefeld. “My life’s passion is to create art from this unconditioned well of being and to inspire such a journey in others. Thus, to have my art and writing in this educational setting is a dream realized, and my aspiration is for the students and visitors to the university to embark on their own journeys of inner discovery and creative expression, learning from my own experiential explorations.”