b. Omaha, NE, 1976

raised in Houston, TX

lives and works in Brooklyn, NY

Hunter College, MFA, 2001

Columbia College, BA, 1998

solo show:

Cut Pieces, Albert Merola Gallery, Provincetown, August 17- September 5, 2018

group shows:

Flat File Exhibition, curated by Jane Lawrence and Monica Carrier, Peep Space, Tarrytown, NY, November 13- December 20, 2020

Vanishing Point, curated by Maria Britton and April Childers, Camayuhs, Atlanta, September 14- October 26, 2019

Every Woman Biennial, La Mama Galleria, New York, May 19-29, 2019

Distance, curated by Steve Locke and Betsy Alwin, Dorsky Gallery Curatorial Programs, Long Island City, New York, February 17- April 7, 2019

Living Room: UIT (Use it together), curated by Amanda Abi Khalil, ISCP, Brooklyn, New York, February 12- May 17, 2019

Scorpio Rising, curated by Carl D’Alvia, Alicia Gibson, Anthony Miler, and Rachel Schmidhofer, Best Western, Ridgewood, New York, November 2-25, 2018

HEAD2HEAD, Albert Merola Gallery, Provincetown, July 6-25, 2018

Climate of New York, curated by Andrew Arnot, Milton Art Bank, Milton, Pennsylvania, May 5- July 21, 2018

Dissonant Accords, 2 person show with Colby Bird, Black Ball Projects, Brooklyn, January 24- February 25, 2018

The Objectness of Paper, curated by Richard Tinkler, Albert Merola Gallery, Provincetown, August 8-31, 2017

RISE, curated by Lynn Sullivan, 6 St. Nicholas Avenue, Brooklyn, November 20, 2016

False Deities, curated by Jim Butler, GridSpace, Brooklyn, September 2016

Polymorphous, curated by Joel Carreiro, The Cluster Gallery, Brooklyn, September 9-30, 2016

Shit Show: Moving In, old fashioned apartment show, Brooklyn, July 16, 2016

Four Paintings: Picture Window, Regina Rex, Queens/ Brooklyn, June 29- August 4, 2013

From the Gut, with Heart, Sugar, Brooklyn, April 21 - June 24, 2012

Daniel Hesidence Curates, Tracy Williams, New York, July 9 - August 6, 2010

Jubilee, Mike Joo's, 16 Van Dyke, Brooklyn, December 12, 2009 - January 15, 2010

Group Show curated by Jennifer Boysen, Angela Hanley Gallery, Los Angeles, September 6 - October 12, 2007

curatorial projects:

The Dark State, Bushwick Open Studios, September 23-24, 2017

Digging: a group show, Bushwick Open Studios, June 6-7, 2015

Drawings Related to Performance Works, 92Y Tribeca, New York, April 5-30, 2012

press:

Interview with Joe Brommel, October 2019, Wassaic Project

Interview in the Huffington Post with Elizabeth Insogna July 17, 2016

(interviews are transcribed below) 

residencies:

The Wassaic Project, October 2019

Culture Vultures Fez/ Sefrou Morocco, April 2017

The Wassaic Project, January- February 2016

Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, 2004

Interview

with Joe Brommel, October 2019

I want to talk about ovals. Most of your paintings involve this central oval shape — it's usually  slightly wider at the top than it is at the bottom — and your ceramics are either ovaline or incorporate some sort of oval shape within them. Can you talk about what draws you to that shape in particular as a central theme running throughout your work?

Sometimes it's different things. It's been a head. It’s been an egg. Sometimes it’s both. Currently, with the ceramic work that I'm making here, it's a pregnant belly. All of those things are sites for fertility, for growth, for gestation — for something that can “become.”

Can you say more about those? Fertility, growth, and gestation.

I’m interested in this historical tradition of representing women as fertility symbols. And I'm really interested in this concept of the forest floor — things are decaying and creating growth and it's all part of this process.

I mean, I started thinking about my own fertility around when I turned 40, a couple of years ago, and I was pretty certain that I wasn't going to reproduce physically. [Laughs.] But then I realized that I could be fertile with many things, that I wasn't cut off from this continuum of life, that I was definitely a part of that through making things and contact with other people — how broad that idea of fertility can be. 

What was it like to make that shift from just thinking about it in those terms to thinking about it in a broader sense? Because, yeah, when people talk about fertility, it's usually framed in terms of just human reproductive fertility. And how does that connect eventually to the cycles of decay you were talking about with the forest floor?

It's easier for me to just talk about the works. So, right now I'm working with two forms: one of them is this pregnant belly and one of them is what I consider a cremation urn — a rectangular form that's the size of the body if it were burned. This is the space that a human body takes up before it enters our world, and this is the space that a human body takes up after it leaves our world — and they’re really similar. [Laughs.] I'm interested in this unknowable quality of both of these kinds of spaces.

And have these forms and these explorations just recently emerged in the past several years?

Mhm. Yeah.

Okay. So what were you working on before then? And then what was that shift like to move into these types of forms? What stayed the same, what was different? 

I, for a while, have been interested in ancient objects. So when I was at Wassaic previously, in 2016, I was looking at these objects, either in museums or in books, and then making paintings from those things. Fertility objects, death symbols — the things that tend to be saved from these cultures are about these kinds of big things. Like, they don’t tend to save pop culture. [Laughs.]

So I was really looking at that and kind of re-teaching myself art history through what my interest was, and not what someone was putting on a slide on a wall to show me. Kind of disregarding the text, too, and thinking, What do I see in this image? What is there for me? And then it's kind of morphed into just me making these things myself. 

Can you say more about moving away from the text of art history? Because, like, I often feel when reading art history that it's sort of prescriptive, that the text comes before the work. But the work was partially made because something that you couldn’t put into words had to be put into visual terms. So can you talk about what led you to wanting to move away from that, and what that has been like to move away from that?

I mean, I think that what you just said is absolutely true. Like if I could say the thing that would explain why I made the Venus of Willendorf, why would I make the Venus of Willendorf?

You would just write it.

Yeah. And then that's from a culture that's 40,000 years old. We don't know what those people were thinking. We don't know why they made that. And then, if you start writing about it, it's all your own nonsense. You're just putting it — it's just about you. But you didn't make that thing.

It takes away some of the mystery in some respect, too.

Yeah. Or the bigger, more complicated, messy thing that it could be.

Absolutely. But I want to take a little bit of a left turn and ask about the process of making these ceramics. You’ve been pit-firing ceramics in Wassaic, right? Tell me the story of that, because I know that the ceramics studio doesn't have a pit in it.

I guess because I'm interested in ancient art, and this is the way that people fired ceramics for thousands of years. I live in Brooklyn, and I didn't have access to do this, so I applied to come here because I knew they had the field and I could dig a hole in it. [Laughs.]

So we dug a 3 x 6 x 3 foot hole out there, and I fired it twice. It's really similar to the way Native Americans would have fired their pottery. It warmed everything up slowly, there's a chemical makeup of the pit that creates these colors — the flame moving around the things is creating color and leaving a trace. And it's very married to the imagery that I'm working with and my thought process. It’s been amazing. It takes the surface quality out of my hands. It's very much chance, and they sort of have this patina that looks ancient.

Are the pregnant belly forms that you're creating part of a series?

No. I’ve just been working serially with these bellies in different configurations and forms. I like that there's a proliferation of them. [Laughs.] I would like to see them all hanging on the wall. Like, something about this one informs that one, and then you can go back and be like, Oh, is that the umbilical cord? Or is that the snake? Is that the snake skin? They comment on each other. They kind of help each other along.

You’ve also done works on paper and painting in the past. How do those interact within your practice?

I don't really know. I became an artist because of painting, and something about the mystery of painting. But then through working with those ancient objects, a lot of them are made of clay, and I was just into how like painting that was — that it was showing the hand, and immediate — so I took a community clay class and started making sculpture.

And I also felt like, when I went to school in the 90s, if I wanted to be a fine artist I had to eliminate anything that could be considered craft. And I feel like that distinction is not so prevalent now, that people are much more open-minded. So as a woman, the first thing I had to do was make big oil paintings to be like, “I'm an artist. I’m not a craftswoman. I am an artist.”

Which is a completely arbitrary line. [Laughs.]

It is. And it was also a tool of power. Art was something that men made. Working class straight men did the work of making art, making paintings, and craft was decorative. All of that is a way to separate people out.

But I feel like sometimes these things have to rear their ugly head before they’re able to die. So I'm hoping that we're in that moment where — I feel like young people don't see the world that way. They see the world as very fluid. And it's awesome. Very freeing. It’s cool. It’s so cool.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Interview with Becky Kinder

07/17/2016 02:35 pm ET

Elizabeth Insogna: Your paintings intersect the ancient world in ways that evoke a personal connection indicative of a meaningful resurgence. Could you talk about this relationship?

Becky Kinder: I have been working from ancient objects for the past three years or so. I started by being interested in very old American cultures, things that used to be called Pre-Columbian, but over time this has grown to include all kinds of things, from all kinds of times and places and made for all kinds of reasons.

 A few years ago my mom was diagnosed with a degenerative brain disorder and she has been losing her facilities since. Over the intense process of taking care of her I became interested in how we change and die and what we leave behind. Where have the parts of her that are no longer there gone? Discovering artifacts from a gone culture is like finding the collective memories or dreams of the people who made them.

The objects that have been protected and survive from these ancient cultures are about the most important, fertile, traumatic and powerful things: life, birth, death, sex, love, survival, the divine. Seeing these objects is like intimately meeting their makers, even though our cultures could be thousands of years apart, across the globe and infinitely different. These objects reach through all of that difference and that is what I connect with. It’s like being drawn to another person, sometimes you don’t initially know why, but the feeling and the reasons behind it can be very profound.

I am working through my own life emotions through these images, trying to understand my self and my connection to the world, as we all are. I’m less interested in what these objects mean in an anthropological sense than in how they resonate now, how they help me to comprehend my own experience of taking care of my dying mother, falling in love, being triumphant, making mistakes, falling out of love, failing, not being sure and trying to connect with myself truthfully. I consider the paintings a visual diary.

EI: Your work oscillates between intimate & delicate works on paper, to large bolder works that are completed quickly. Could you talk about these processes as well as the raw & spiritual qualities that are a part of your work?

BK: The small works are a way of getting to know the material I am working with. The drawings are done directly from an image or from life, at a museum. Through the act of drawing it, the object is translated through me and becomes a part of my vocabulary. I work to understand it while it is working its way through me, effecting and changing me. The knowledge that I gain through doing this lets me be freer, more expressionistic and vulnerable in the large paintings. The images in the paintings are more inventive, intuitive and uninhibited and are a union of several objects or ideas of objects.

The paintings are large and very physical, related to my body. Sometimes I am painting an object that is a couple inches high on a canvas that is taller than I am. I try to just let the paintings happen and not clean them up more than necessary to make them legible. The paint runs and pools, is wiped away and re-applied. The sensibility and speed of drawing is there as is the action and movement of my body while I am making the work.

At my studio, you described my paintings as hungry ghosts, and I really identified with this. Searching, uneasy, unsettled, restless. Images with unfinished business in this world and maybe even leaning towards the unfinished themselves.

EI: How does your daily Ashtanga Yoga practice influence your work?

BK: Great question, I hope I can do it some justice. Ashtanga is an intensely disciplined physical and devotional practice and it’s how I start most of my days. One of the things the practice is about is giving in, paying attention and being true to yourself, in that moment. If you try to do anything else, the truth will out itself, you will be injured or exhausted or bored and out of whack and you will have to adjust back and surrender to your true ability. I think painting is the same, sometimes you think you are working with certain ideas and then the real content of the work makes itself known slowly over time. Having the attention to recognize that is a huge part of sustaining an interesting and alive practice of painting over a lifetime. We change, our imagery changes, meaning changes for us. We don’t always have to control this or know why these changes are happening. There’s freedom and possibility in that not knowing.

Ashtanga forces you to be honest and humble and that’s invaluable to making art, trusting and just letting yourself go. I see a lot of work that is a celebration or flaunting of people’s symptoms, and that can be fascinating, comforting and extremely relatable. There is so much pain. Ashtanga and painting are both ways of sorting through that. What if we were thriving, mentally healthy beings? What would our work be about then?

EI: What have you been reading lately?

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BK: I’m a voracious reader. I have a couple ongoing reading projects. One is reading books and essays about love. Another is reading the journals, letters and autobiographies of women artists, writers and intellectuals. And I love epic, long novels, so I love both the Ferrante and the Knausgaard that everyone is reading now. Both can be seen as coded diaristic projects.

The best book that I have read about love so far is The Art of Loving by Erich Fromm. It’s a very Buddhist book, even though he was a Frankfurt School psychoanalyst, and I love that he came to these ideas about love being something that has to extend to everyone and everything in order for it to be genuinely felt for one other person. He talks about love as a state of being, not an attachment to an idea or person. It’s huge, liberating and really beautiful. Struggling to understand love is one of the things that is at the center of my practice, and this book was a revelation for me. It seems so simple, and yet…

I have slowly been reading the letters of Georgia O’Keeffe and visited her home in New Mexico last year. Along with Frida Kahlo’s home and Lee Krasner’s studio, it is one of the few preserved sites where a woman artist lived and worked and it is a powerful place. By the end of the tour I was openly weeping. I identify with her solitude and admire her courage to do what was necessary to make her work. She is often trivialized, but she was a strong fore bearer of a truly American abstraction. So much of what we know, admire and do wouldn’t have been possible without her.

A few months ago I joined a feminist reading group, we call ourselves In(queery), and that has been so valuable for really looking at what it is and has been to be a woman, a feminist and a creative person. There’s a power in looking closely at that history and understanding it and it has been amazing to do this with a group of people of different ages, experiences and responses. These issues are so present, as both a wall that I come upon daily and as a pure delight and source of meaning in my life and work.