CONTACT / SOCIAL MEDIA / SUPPORT

Kate can be reached at kkretz4art (at) aol.com, or (336) 266-9678. You can follow her on Facebook, Instagram at katekretzartist, or (rarely) on X/Twitter at kkretz4art. Her LinkedIn profile includes many written recommendations from lifelong colleagues. Her Youtube channel includes some of her lectures and conference papers. You can help Kate continue to speak truth to power by supporting her on Patreon or directly through Paypal at kkretz4art(at)aol.com.

BIO

Kate Kretz is an Associate Professor of Studio Art, as well as a professional artist, activist, author, speaker, and Fulbright Specialist.

She grew up in upstate NY, the eldest of five children. Her father, a high school French & Latin teacher, took a sabbatical with his (then) family of six to live in France for a year when Kate was 9, where she attended French public school. At 18, Kate went back to Paris with $200 in her pocket. She drew plaster casts in an École Des Beaux Arts class and earned a Cours De La Civilization Française certificate at The Sorbonne while working as an au pair for a prominent French family. Returning to the states, she put herself through school, earning a BFA at Binghamton University (SUNY Foundation Award for Excellence in the Fine Arts, Harpur College Departmental Honors in Art, and Harpur College Academic Honors) while working as a picture framer. After a few years of being Art Director at an ad agency, she returned to academia and earned an MFA from the University of Georgia, where she received both University-wide & Departmental Teaching Assistantships.

Kretz was trained as a painter, but creates across disciplines, choosing the most potent medium for each project. Recent work includes “corrective manifestations of the truth” made from deconstructed MAGA hats, human hair embroideries, dense, bas-relief cotton floss embroideries, highly wrought oil and acrylic paintings, pyrography (wood burning) and tiny silverpoint drawings on found silver objects. She is generally focused on creating time-intensive, intricate work that reveals difficult truths.

Her 2012 solo exhibition, This Sharp World, at Hardcore Art Contemporary Space in Miami, was reviewed in The Huffington Post, El Nuevo Herald, Art Districts magazine, and was Elisa Turner's "Critic's Pick for the Summer of 2012" on ArtCircuits.com, and Desirée Almodovar's "Editor's Pick" for Flavorpill.com. Presently, Kate is deeply engaged in an expansive ongoing project, "#bullyculture," which includes work examining the culture that gave us Trump, as well as her post-2016 Lie Hole drawings & MAGA hat work. The early work was exhibited at York College in PA, with an accompanying 62 page catalog (online version here) and a review at Delicious Line and The York Daily Record. This challenging series was shown, with additional new work, at Coastal Carolina University in Fall of 2018, at a popup in San Francisco in Summer of 2019 (reviewed here), University of Central Arkansas in 2020, and at the Peeler Art Center at DePauw University in 2022. We are seeking additional venues as the series continues to grow.

Kretz’s work has appeared in over 95 international newspapers and has been featured repeatedly in the New York Times, The Washington Post, The Miami Herald, The Huffington Post, The Atlanta Journal/Constitution, ArtPapers, and Surface Design, as well as appearing in Esquire, Vanity Fair Italy, ELLE Japon, and PASAJES DISENO magazines. Her controversial painting, “Blessed Art Thou”, was covered by hundreds of international news sources, and continues to be published in magazines and university textbooks worldwide, fifteen years later. (A full list is here.) In 2019, Kate’s series of work made with deconstructed MAGA hats got her banned from Facebook and Instagram, and led to threats against her and her work.

Exhibitions include the Museum of Arts & Design in NYC, Museum of Design Holon, Van Gijn Museum, Kunstraum Kreuzberg, Academy of Arts & Design at Tsinghua University in Beijing, Racine Museum, Wignall Museum, Katonah Museum, Frost Art Museum, Fort Collins MOCA, Telfair Museum, Fort Lauderdale Museum, the Museo Medici, San Jose Museum of Quilts & Textiles, as well as Lyons Wier Ortt & 31Grand Gallery in NY, Chelsea Galleria and Hardcore Art Contemporary Space in Miami, and Packer/Schopf in Chicago. Collections include The Frost Art Museum, the John & Maxine Belger Family Foundation, Manuel de Santaren, Patricio Wills & Adriana Santos Wills, Morris Corporation, Montgomery County Public Arts Trust Contemporary Works on Paper Collection, Martyn J Forrester, Isabelle Bellis, Nina Fuentes, James Swope & Scott Robertson, Jerry Cullum, Jeff Speck, Rachel Camber, Ernest & Cathy Abbott, Jay Schlossberg & Eileen Brengle, & Alfred Jan, among others.

Kate has consistently worked to inform and empower young artists, addressing prescient issues that have later become “hot topics” in the art world. In March of 1997, as a new professor at Florida International University, she organized the panel “Art & Failure,” where the full faculty shared stories of studio and career frustrations. She warned of careerism eclipsing artistic freedom and voice with a paper delivered at the 2002 Southeastern College Art Conference. In March of 2000, she put together a panel of successful artist/mothers called “Picasso Didn’t Do The Dishes First: Prioritizing Art In Your Life.” In September of 2012, she delivered a paper, "The Final Art Taboo: Identity Politics of Motherhood", at the Textile Society of America's Biennial Symposium in Washington, DC (video available for viewing here). Going beyond addressing the art world marginalization of artist mothers, it was the first published argument that becoming a mother can make artists’ work more powerful. She has been advocating for the development of visual voice as a cornerstone of Studio Arts Foundations since her 2021 paper at the CAA Conference, then wrote a textbook to guide artists through this process.

Kretz is on the Fulbright Specialist Roster through 2024. She is a 2020 James Renwick Society Distinguished Artist. She has received the MD Council For The Arts Grant (in 2015, 2017 and 2021 for Crafts, and 2018 for Painting), The NC Arts Council Grant, The South Florida Cultural Consortium Fellowship, The Florida Visual Arts Fellowship, a Millay Colony Residency, a Hambidge Center Fellowship, and the Southeastern College Art Conference's 2016 award for Outstanding Artistic Achievement.

After working as an Associate Professor and BFA Director at Florida International University for ten years, she now works in her studio and teaches part time, while giving workshops and lectures at various universities and art centers, such as MICA, Pratt Institute, Boston University, Virginia Commonwealth University, Hobart and Williams Smith Colleges, The Society for Contemporary Craft in Pittsburgh, Antioch, CUNY, The Peeler Art Center, Agnes Scott College, NC State, UNC Chapel Hill, Elon University, Frost Art Museum, Mississippi College for Women, Austin Peay, Catholic University, Binghamton University, Coker College, USC Columbia, The Fiber Arts Foundation, York College, Coastal Carolina University, Broward College, Appalachian State University, and the Hollywood Art & Culture Center. She was also a speaker at the Center for the Study of American Democracy at Kenyon College and Keynote Speaker at Miami-Dade Community College Arts & Letters Day.

She was a frequent contributor to Hyperallergic’s Drawing In A Time of Fear & Lies series, and still publishes essays at Medium. She recently received an inaugural Shoenberg Fellowship from Montgomery College for a Spring 2021 sabbatical to complete her first book, a prescriptive guide to finding visual voice. Art From Your Core: A Holistic Guide to Visual Voice, was published in March of 2024 by Intellect Press of London, distributed by The University of Chicago Press, and is available at Barnes & Noble, Amazon, and others. She has also contributed a chapter to Interrogating the Visual Culture of Trumpism, part of the Routledge Research in Art and Politics series, edited by Grant Hamming and Natalie E. Phillips, to be released in September of 2024.

She lives in MD with her partner, her daughter, a Boxer named Eldred, and a magnificent Black Tupelo tree.

STATEMENT

“I make art to keep myself sane. It is a way to process what is happening in the world around me, and I do it compulsively. My heart and nervous system resemble that of a folk artist, albeit one who has read way too many books.

I often experience news stories of inhumanity as a literal blow to my body, and carry the negative energy around with me until I process a way to exorcise it from my person, through transformative creation. I make the objects that need to exist in the world to represent some essential truth: it is undeniably clear what needs to be manifested through me at any given historical moment. While in-process, my work functions as a meditation, a healing prayer, a potent incantation to embed the finished object with as much power as possible. Often, the concentrated energy imbued in the object ultimately manifests as a scream, appropriately rivaling the impact of that original negative impetus that demanded its materialization. I aim for a beautiful, exquisitely-crafted gut punch.

I consider the inordinate amount of time invested in each piece as a gift given to the viewer, and stop only when there's not one more thing I could do to make it more powerful. In this day and age, it often feels as though the earnest, cathectic things I make are an act of profound resistance: I give birth to the tactile as I am swallowed by the virtual. I obsess over craft as our world becomes disposable. I wield emotion in its messiness because it’s uncool. I work until my hands shake, because the world does not care.

I am banging my head against the wall, but the stain is beautiful. ”

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