Kate Clark (artist)


Kate Clark is a New York-based sculptor, residing and working in Brooklyn. Her work synthesizes human faces with the bodies of animals, the signature component in all of her work. These sculptures study the tension between personal and mythical realms, and draw a fine line between the characteristics of animals and humans. Kate's preferred medium is actual animal hide. Mary Logan Barmeyer says Clark's work is "meant to make you think twice about what it means to be human, and furthermore, what it means to be animal." Writer Monica Ramirez-Montagut says Clark's works "reclaim storytelling and vintage techniques as strategies to address contemporary discourses on welfare, the environment, and female struggles."

Education/Early Career

Kate Clark comes from a background in arts, with her father being a painter and owning his own company. Kate's art of choice was painting, in fact, she did not get into sculpting until college. In 1994, Kate Clark graduated from Cornell University with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Sculpture. She went on to obtain a Master of Fine Arts degree from Cranbrook Academy of Art in 2001. Kate began her work creating a piece called How Are You? which was featured in the Forum Gallery of the Cranbrook Art Museum in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan. This museum was first open to the public in 1942. Kate had her first solo exhibit at Claire Oliver Gallery in New York in 2008. Since then Kate has been included in museum exhibitions at the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, The Islip Art Museum, and The Bellevue Arts Museum. Kate had her first solo museum show in 2010 at the Mobile Museum of Art.

Critical reaction

Reviewing "Pretty Tough: Contemporary Storytelling" at The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, CT, Benjamin Genocchio for The New York Times called her work "successful as works of visual theater", praising one work, Matriarch, as "particularly unsettling".

Exhibitions

Solo Exhibitions

2010
2008
2007
2016
2012
Glenbow Museum, Calgary, Alberta, Canada
2011
2009
2008
2007
2006
2005
2003
2002
2001
2000
hi
Kate Clark's work has been collected internationally and is in public collections such as the David Roberts Art Foundation in London and the C-Collection in Switzerland. Her awards and residencies are as follows:
Marie Walsh Sharpe Art Foundation, Space Program, New York, Sept 2011- August 2012
Fine Arts Work Center, Winter Fellowship, Provincetown, Massachusetts October 2006 - May 2007
Jentel Artist Residency Program, Banner, Wyoming October - November 2005