Kathryn pictured with Untitled, Shirt in Little Bits and Pieces at BICA Buffalo, August 2022
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Kathryn Shriver (she/her) is a visual artist from Western New York, now currently living and working in Pittsburgh, PA. Her work spans across painting, sculpture, drawing, video, and writing, but is grounded in a materiality-based approach with a particular focus on glass beads. Kathryn holds a BA in Studio Arts from Wells College (Aurora, NY) and an MFA in Painting and Drawing from Concordia University (Montreal), and has also received training from the Art Students League in New York and as a copyist in the Musée du Louvre. She has attended residencies with the Vermont Studio Center, MOMUS, and Sager Reeves Gallery (Columbia, MO), among others. Her work has been shown across the United States and Canada, including with Studio Sixty Six (Ottawa, ON), Tempus Projects / CUNSTHAUS (Tampa, FL), Gallery 621 (Tallahassee, FL), Sager Reeves Gallery, and Kingfish (Buffalo, NY). Alongside her art practice, Kathryn has an invested interest in arts-based research; she has previously worked on funded research-creation projects for artist Nadia Myre (Concordia University, Montreal) and is currently working with the Contemporary Geometric Beadwork research team as Artist Fellow.
Kathryn's work is based in a curiosity about relationships between taste, ornament, making and self-fashioning as a woman from a white, working-class family steeped in values of bootstrapping, social climbing, and intentional assimilation. Heightened by the friction between her academic background in painting and a longstanding interest in domestic craft inherited from her mother and grandmother, the tensions between different conceptions of creativity, expression, and knowledge production accepted across social classes and contexts guide the questioning at the heart of her practice. Slippages and tensions inherent in the privilege of white femininity, enactments of mimicry, the politics of glamour, working with and transcending practical constraints, second-hand information, and the liminality between the domestic, industrial, and artistic are key themes of interest. Both playful and interrogative in intention, Kathryn's work calls up and questions multiple aesthetic systems, vernacular to avant-garde, and uses deep, materially-specific engagement to understand how art and craft work to both reify and reorganize traditions and inheritances, cultural and personal. |