Kristan Kennedy is a Portland-based artist, curator, and educator. Kennedy the Artistic Director and Curator of Visual Art at the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art (PICA). For the last decade, Kennedy has focused on commissioning new work by international emerging artists in the form of large-scale, site-specific installations and solo projects that exist at the borders of genres. Kennedy takes an expansive view of visual art and also organizes music, performance art, publications, social engagement and new media projects as part of PICA’s year-round programming and for the organization’s annual Time-Based Art Festival. Kennedy teaches Contemporary Art and Critical Thinking at the Pacific Northwest College of Art as part of their MFA in Visual Studies department. She is represented by Fourteen30 Contemporary, Portland, Oregon.
Kristan Kennedy
“The terrific range of project proposals we receive each year speaks to the mobile and porous disciplinary boundaries of contemporary art practice, and to the rich and inventive ways writers approach art today. They are alert to the urgent need to expand the conventions of art history and criticism with ideas from other discourses, such as black studies, transnational and diaspora studies, gender and women’s studies, and LGBT studies. The work of lesser known and overlooked artists and art communities continues to be mined, with writers articulating new ways to counter the striking imbalances of race, class and gender that continue to affect the arts and the culture industry.”