We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Katy Kidd. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Katy below.

Katy, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. How do you think about vacations as a business owner? Do you take them and if so, how? If you don’t, why not?

I absolutely take vacations. For me they are less of “getting away” from the life I have, but more they add to the life I already have. I learned a long time ago to like what I do so I never really feel like I need to escape my life. As a visual artist I find a ton of inspiration in traveling. I prefer International travel over domestic. I like to shock my system and get out of my comfort zone. My second was-band was the one who got me interested in places like Africa, India, South East Asia and Latin America. We lived and raised our family in Santa Fe. In the winter months when the kids were young we would gather them, the dogs and ourselves in a camper and head south into Mexico.We, at one point, drove as far as Costa Rica. I homeschooled the kids as we slowed down the pace and explored as much as we could. At some point we stopped the driving and went to farther reaching countries. I have photographs from every place we ever went and use all of these experiences and imagery in my art.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

I realize that I loved making art in 1978. I was in first grade. We had activity tables set up around the room. One would be art, another reading, another math and so on. In twos we would move like clockwork through each table. I can remember the feeling of having to stop working at the art table and move on to the next. I can only describe that feeling as “deflated”. I think I must have found some sort of deep curiosity and contentment in making art. This drive and interest never left me. I am working at the moment only as a printmaker. I am an oil painter, a wheat paste artist and I play in 3D work as well. Currently I am preparing to take a piece of artwork to Mexico City to install it later this week. It is a piece I created during an online residency with the Bureau of Queer Art, queer and allied artists, based in Cuernavaca, Mexico. I have a large piece in a show in CDMX opening one Friday night at the Centro Cultural, Juan Rulfo. The piece is a real life wedding dress that I meticulously printed images on over the summer through the residency. The theme is Ephemera. I chose to create a piece around the idea that love is ephemeral and explore this through the lens of loss and change in love stories through death, divorce, etc. The work that I create is often times heavy and serious, but I use comedic undertones. I suppose this is also how I get through difficulties in life, Humor is a large part of my personal ethos. I have found it essential to manage the wackiness of life.

Are there any resources you wish you knew about earlier in your creative journey?

When I was studying art in college the internet was just being invented. There were no large search engines. There was no googling an artist name and then searching pages of images. The same went for searching something like “mid century furniture”. The way to research was through your local library. Some libraries “search engines” weren’t even on a computer yet and we had to stand in front of a huge piece of furniture that held small, alphabetized 3″ x 5″ notecards that would tell you the information on the books available in the building that you were looking for and then it would tell you what shelf to find the book in. Everything I wanted to know was limited to what my local libraries had on the shelves. I was introduced to artists by browsing the shelves in the art section. Most of these books were male artists and most of them were white European artist, heavy hitters, like Michelangelo, Monet, Degas, etc. Van Gogh was the wild card of the bunch. In the 80’s and 90’s and 2000’s, books were being written about some of my favorite artists now. I attended a women’s college for a stint and fortunately the art department was hearty and the library had just the few books out there on women artists like Judy Chicago, Susan Rothenberg, Grandma Moses. Most books on women artists hadn’t even been written yet. I attended a women in art history class using the first textbook on “Women Artists” that had just been printed and was published by the newly built, The National Museum of Women in the Arts, located in Washington, D.C. A few years later I got lucky at another college I attended in the Pacific Northwest that had a book in their library on Fritz Scholder, a Native American contemporary artist. This one book blew my mind open with what was possible in terms of color, brush strokes, etc. His work was a huge departure away from what I had been studying. What we had in terms of information at our fingertips was incredibly limited, but the thing is, we didn’t know what we were missing. We didn’t know what was possible. We had nothing to compare our libraries to. We made due with what we could find. I don’t necessarily feel like I missed out on anything so much as I am just grateful for what we have now with the World Wide Web and being able to research anything with a few clicks and wifi access.

What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?

The greatest lesson I have had to learn and try to incorporate in my thinking is simple: Life isn’t happening TO me, life is happening FOR me. Getting out of the poor me, victim mindset and having gratitude has changed my quality of life, in all aspects of my life. Pass it on.

Contact Info:

• Website: katykidd.org
• Instagram: katykidd2

Image Credits
Katy Kidd