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

Kate, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. When did you first know you wanted to pursue a creative/artistic path professionally?

As a fourth grader, I dressed up in my mother’s beret and a painting smock holding a palette for career day. So, in some ways I’d say I’ve always known I have wanted to be an artist. Even though at the time I didn’t realize that “career” and “passion” could even be the same thing, I was going to force my will until it happened.

Later, in college, I studied graphic design because I thought getting a degree in it would be practical and help me stay creative, and make money. But I quickly learned not only that path wasn’t for me, I just couldn’t stay away from my studio work. Fast forward to over a decade later, and I’m a practicing artist and college professor helping my students realize that, whether you’re a fourth grader or 97, once you’re bitten by the art bug–it’ll never let go.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

In the forest and rolling hills of south central Kentucky, I grew up a barefoot outside kid in a home full of creatives. My mother and father both studied art, my brother is a musician, and my sister is a designer and potter. Our childhoods were filled with rock painting, make-shift stages including handmade props, cardboard box forts, and music. Fortunately, my passion was nurtured from an early age to appreciate handmade things and to watch things grow. I realize now how much of a privilege it was to always have clarity on what drives me to move forward–which is art.

I never spent much time thinking about other career paths I could take, and when I did, it always ended in fits of depression and anxiety. When I was in college, I would use art as a way of procrastinating my other work and eventually decided to put off having a “real job” by going to grad school. After three years, I couldn’t escape it any longer. I had to figure out a way to make money AND stay making things. Through teaching college, I can inspire my students to pursue their dreams while being supported by my institution to continue mine. Because teaching felt like it came naturally to me, and it was a way to make money, it felt like an obvious choice.

I’m now located in middle Tennessee as an Associate Professor at Middle Tennesee State University where I instruct foundations-level art to undergraduate students. I’m a working artist and make paintings, drawings, and ceramics out of my office space and communal studios in the art building at MTSU. This is the fifth institution where I have maintained professorship and I am enthusiastic about planting deep roots in Murfreesboro. Alongside my personal body of work, I typically take commissioned murals and collaborate with my community for art events and classes. Currently, I am working on a public-facing mural in my hometown of Franklin Kentucky where I will be creating a 30′ x 60′ painting inspired by my childhood growing up there.

My personal work is made in reaction to our visually saturated world. Interested in how our perception of reality fluctuates between internal and external—consciousness and decoration, my work is in conversation with a revolving door of inquiry surrounding value hierarchies, object philosophies, and vision.

The human and object-like figures in my work are often situated in scenery that are retellings of my life. I look to the forms in my paintings as they acquire their own agency and I allow them to reject a polarized, hierarchical value structure in a way that theorists, like Graham Harmon, discuss. Object Oriented Ontology is a school of thought that rejects the privileging of human existence over nonhuman objects. All relations, including those between nonhumans or things, distort their related objects in the same basic manner as human consciousness does, and exists on an equal footing with one another. This school of thought allows us to consider that we exist as objects in the universe with equal experience to a cat, mug, or car.

I make hand-painted and printed double-sided wallpaper tapestries to place the viewer in a loosely translated domestic scene surrounded by painting arrangements. Inside the paintings are figures, still lives, and a wide context of subject matter in varying degrees of recognizability. Invoking the familiar through the incorporation of ubiquitous objects such as wallpaper, mugs, and furniture that teeter between abstract and representation, the characters in my work embody the residue of objects in their spaces. I consider these elements to democratize space, and use object-oriented ontology as means to empathy.

Concerning sight, I find new relevancy in impressionism because of its relationship with vision. Rejecting symbolism and appreciating painting as decoration, the Nabis (a word in Hebrew meaning “prophet) were a group of rogue impressionist painters who set out to free color and form from symbolic meaning and representational functions to accept and celebrate them as moments of truth. As imperfect bodies unlike AI and cameras, we are physically incapable of recognizing the details of our reality all at once. Seeing color as a medium in and of itself, Pierre Bonnard made colors dance across lengths of canvases that depicted normal, domestic, and nature-inspired scenes from his life.

Using these platforms of question-making, I make work intuitively, through memory, and using photographs I’ve taken of my life, as well as image grabs from reality TV shows to develop subject matter including but not limited to still life, landscape, vegetation, figuration, vessels, interiors, and more. I implement printmaking and ceramics as other culminations of the subject matter and invite them to evolve organically, in the same fashion as the drawings and paintings.

I feel that through a constant interest in painting throughout history and sitting on the shoulders of giants, I aim to ask questions about us, our reality, and our place in the universe.

What can society do to ensure an environment that’s helpful to artists and creatives?

I do think visual artists are sometimes seen by parts of society on a lower rung of existence. Being a creative can sometimes be difficult because the work isn’t taken as seriously as other disciplines. This is really unfortunate because of what artists have to offer in the way of their ability to problem solve, be resourceful, and be community-oriented. I think the best way for society to support artists is by first taking them as seriously as say, an accountant or a lawyer, This isn’t to say other careers are not imperative to society, it’s just to bring light to the value that artists may bring in addition to. If society could look at ideas and creative thought as more of a method of commerce, artists would be able to support themselves and grow.

In addition to this thought, I also think if artists can continue to collaborate on different projects and create places to exhibit and share work, it will help a thriving ecosystem of creatives.

Any resources you can share with us that might be helpful to other creatives?

Especially earlier on, I wish I had known that it is NOT beneficial to be a studio hermit working alone 24/7. Even though I naturally work that way, never sharing your work with your network and never talking through things is not helpful. What I’m saying is, that I wish I had known that my greatest resources were in my immediate surroundings as my friends, supporters, and colleagues. And knowing how to do a really good google search is sometimes your best friend.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.katekinder.com
• Instagram: @kateiskinder

Image Credits
Studio portrait of myself in front of work: Kris Sanford