Kristan Kennedy is a Portland-based artist, curator, and educator.  She is the Artistic Director, Curator of Visual Art for the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art (PICA). For more than a 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 teaches in the Visual Studies MFA program at the Pacific Northwest College of Art (PNCA) Contemporary Art.

Kennedy is represented by Fourteen30 Contemporary, Portland, Oregon. While the artist identifies as a painter, she also questions the history, process and medium that she is complicit in perpetuating.

Curator and critic Stephanie Snyder says of Kennedy’s paintings in Artforum, “their intense dialectic of beauty and repulsion mirrors the artist’s philosophical struggles—we sense that both artist and artwork have gone through the wringer—together—to achieve a hard-won grace”.

Recent exhibitions include Flat Fix, Halsey McKay Gallery, NY; Eyes, Ditch Projects, OR; Sunday, Crisp-Ellert Museum, FL; Kristan Kennedy Meets a Clock, Soloway, NY; Sleeper, Fourteen30 Contemporary, OR; OO, Misako & Rosen, Tokyo; Tomorrow, Tomorrow, CANADA and Other Colors, Fourteen30 Contemporary.

The Snake, featuring DB Amorin, Judy Cooke, Jessica Diamond, Marcus Fischer, keyon gaskin, Daniel Godinez Nivón, and Kameelah Janan Rasheed Curated by Kristan Kennedy, Portland Institute for Contemporary Art (PICA) 2018

Kristan Kennedy W.L.L.B.L.N.D.N.E.S., 2017. Ink, dye, and bleach on linen. Collection of the Portland Art Museum