e x h i b i t i o n s
“Loss can be a compass, and nostalgia can be a process of re-encountering what we grieve, miss and treasure,” says northern New Mexico-based artist Kat Kinnick. “As we engage with what we miss, the memory begins to change and remembrance becomes a creative process in itself.”
Born in Los Ranchos de Albuquerque and now living and working south of Santa Fe, Kinnick’s work as a painter, illustrator, printmaker and ceramicist often celebrates the abundant diversity of the wildlife and wilderness of the high desert. Her upcoming show at Hecho a Mano represents a shift in Kinnick’s artistic philosophy. “I’ve felt so saddened by everything that's happening in the world right now,” she says. “It feels as if all the time and energy and creativity we’ve put into making the world a better place was for nothing.”
While her 2024 show at Hecho a Mano, “A Benevolent Force,” celebrated “the energy of resistance in battle and powerful forces, unflinching amidst the darkness,” Kinnick now feels a profound sense of fatigue. Still, she’s using her artistic practice to process this feeling of hopelessness.
She describes walking in the desert near her home when a voice popped into her head that said, “All is not yet lost.” This show sprang from that gentle voice: a vision of a path forward in recognizing “the tangible vitality in our lives, plant life, the days of beautiful weather, animal sightings, and the reality that we have food and shelter and a vibrant community of kind, creative allies who care, and the legacy of activists and artists whose footsteps we continue to walk.” Even amidst the destruction, Kinnick says, there is an ease in gratitude.
Memento Vivere is part autobiography, part fiction and fantasy: through a variety of media including gouache, oil paint, limited edition screen printing, risograph and paper mache, Kinnick creates a body of work that builds on her breadth of experience with animal subjects and includes human portraits. “For many years, I’ve worked to convey animal expression in a way that a human audience can recognize and identify with,” she says, explaining that “the wordless communication that exists between species and the unique power that has to communicate through an image” defines her approach to portraits of both human and other-than-human subjects, and underlying them all is her love and curiosity for the people and creatures in her life.
The show’s theme is a corollary to the concept of Memento Mori, which Kinnick has always felt drawn to: “To me, death is a part of life, and enhances your experience,” she says. “Memento Vivere is inspired by this concept of Memento Mori but is about remembering to live.”
Kinnick has carried a keen sense of mortality since the sudden loss of her father shortly after she graduated college, and she calls this and growing up in a time of climate collapse the root of the tenderness in her approach to painting.
“Death holds the preciousness of life held against a background of loss to the unknown,” she says, explaining that painting can capture what she wants to hold onto, revealing the magic beneath the surface of daily life “before it is inevitably lost to that mystery—the gift of friendship, the empowering, enlivening force of our community, the uniqueness of each person’s perspective and experience.”
The show grew out of twenty 8 x 10 paintings inspired by favorite visual memories from Kinnick’s November 2024 residency in Oaxaca, which will also be translated into a risograph book made by Polvoh Press: masks, city life, ancient ceramics, textiles and wildlife of the region.
Kinnick sees the role of an artist as part curator, part craftsperson and part innovator. “An artist listens to the heartbreak of the world and wonders what the collective needs,” she says, adding that this body of work “asks how we can cope with all the suffering of the world in this unique time, and hopefully serves as a salve for people, a reminder to live in gratitude for life is a rich, magical tapestry.”
Kinnick’s work has always fostered a profound connection to nature, and the weight of humanity’s destructive impact can feel crushing. She notices how it can paralyze her and others in her community: “I want this work to help them feel less alone, and I hope that it can uplift others that are struggling, and be a breath of fresh air, awakening myths and stories inside themselves that they can then share with us all,” she says.
Opening Reception: Friday May 2nd 5 - 7pm
Artist Talk: Sunday May 4th 12 -1:30pm
Hecho A Mano. Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA
Memento Vivere
Solo Exhibition
On view May 2, 2025 - June 2, 2025
Hecho A Mano. Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA
Regalos (5 x 7)
December 6, 2024 - January 1, 2025
Hecho a Mano’s yearly juried show titled "Regalos". “Every year, we open up our gallery to artists all around New Mexico and give them a chance to have work up on our walls. It not only provides wonderful gifts for our clients but is a gift to us to be able to show the works of artists from our wonderful state.”
Visions West Contemporary. Bozeman, Montana, USA
When the Sun Turns Back and the Moon Sits Still
November 22, 2024 - January, 11 2025
Artists: Beau Carey, Justin Beckman, John Hitchcock, Rachel Denny, Daphne Sweet, Bruna Massadas, Crystal Latimer, Travis Walker, Jess Kellner, Rocky Hawkins, Robin McCauley, Zoe Hawk, Beau Simmons, Robin Crofut Brittingham, Angelica Raquel, Kat Kinnick, and Electric Coffin
Vision West is pleased to announce a joint venue holiday exhibition, When the Sun Turns Back and the Moon Sits Still. This show will feature new works by many of our artists at both our Livingston and Bozeman Montana locations. This exhibition celebrates the holiday season through the lens of winter and the winter solstice, a time when the world seems to pause in a serene embrace of darkness. This eclectic group of artists capture the essence of this magical season—reflecting on themes of introspection, warmth, and the deep connection to nature’s cycles. As we gather with loved ones and seek light in the coldest days of the year, we explore the interplay of light and shadow, echoing the transition from the bustling holiday spirit to the quiet moments of reflection that follow. Join us in this celebration of winter's beauty, where art invites us to embrace the stillness, honor traditions, and find solace in the gentle return of longer days. Let us rediscover the joy and peace that come when we pause to appreciate the world around us
Visions West Contemporary. Denver, Colorado, USA
Narrative - Storytelling Through Art
November 7 - December 7, 2024
Narratives brings together the distinct voices of five artists who craft stories in their art. Each artist weaves narrative threads into their work, transporting viewers to richly imagined worlds—some nostalgic, some introspective, some wild, and some unmistakably Western.
To Kat Kinnick, feminine rage is “The strength that stands before harm and injustice and says ‘No more:’ No more poor decision making, no more destructive, catastrophic, trauma inflicting, warmongering, violating actions.”Her upcoming show, A Benevolent Force, explores this concept through a body of paintings on paper and panel. She poses the question, “What arises to meet the people in power who violate our collective safety by causing climate change, genocide and war?” And her answers take the forms of creatures who, to her, illustrate that force: snarling black wolves, wise animals and dark and devilish gods which she calls “faces of the natural feminine that step in to block the blow of the perpetrator."
Kinnick’s aesthetic and narrative starting point for the show was Hayao Miyazaki’s 1997 film, Princess Mononoke. In the film, the harmony that humans, animals and gods have enjoyed is disintegrating. Kinnick recalls an image from the movie that shows Princess Mononoke riding on a huge, fierce wolf, wearing a “sharp, determined look of feminine rage.” The idea speaks to our present position in the face of mounting existential threats, Kinnick says: In this time there is so much heaviness and bleakness in the world. We’re confronted daily with the awful reality of the continually unfolding climate crisis, with mass ecological and cultural extinctions, with genocide funded by our government, with the prospects that AI may multiply our already unbearable disempowerment and alienation, with capitalism that entrusts the 1% with our most important decisions, with patriarchy that condones men’s violation of boundaries and consent, with white supremacy that supports a rising tide of fascism that is celebrated instead of criminalized… this information age which offered so much possibility and promise in the beginning is becoming a full-fledged dystopia before our eyes.
Kinnick confronts this darkness with characteristic tenderness and acute observation, but also a gathering strength. The animals she depicts are vulnerable, but still a force of reckoning: “Some of them are there and not there at the same time, half-disappearing, with one foot in the spirit realm of extinction—that kind of presence is an omen, a language of its own, that can counsel us for our own survival,” Kinnick says. She’s drawn to the imagery of folk art and myth, both ancient and contemporary, to channel the wildness she embraces. “In each generation our stories and art create narratives that make that force more relatable, and in the process, channel its wild flow into our human lives,” Kinnick says. Through this work, artists and storytellers develop avenues of connection that have the power to unite people in community with one another. Among the show’s paintings will be Kinnick’s illustrations of select folk tales about bees, which she created as a collaboration with German writer Iris de Maaß, who has been collecting these tales for years. “I really connected with the stories,” Kinnick says. “I love the format of children’s book illustration and this bee series is a great opportunity for me to process some of my favorite styles through my own voice.”
Kinnick drew on a breadth of additional cultural references in creating the show, including the movie Mulan, images of Flamenco dancers “who carry strength and simultaneous suffering in their gestures,” the Mountain Goats album Bleed Out, which reminds Kinnick of “A hidden, underestimated force to be reckoned with,” the power and adrenaline of heavy metal, Guillermo Del Toro’s creatures in Pan’s Labyrinth and Pinnochio, and Balkan choral music, among others. To Kinnick, these represent a sense of complex, nuanced power that transcends binaries of good and evil. “Overall,” she says, “this show for me is a reflection of empathy and reverent rebelliousness—of values that I want to see leading us into the future.”
Hecho A Mano. Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA
A Benevolent Force, solo exhibition
May 3 - June 3, 2024
Nuevo Mexicano Heritage Arts Museum. Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA
The Ugly History of Beautiful Things
May 10, 2024 - December 27, 2024
Contemporary artists such as Guadalupe Hernandez, Terran Last Gun, Arthur Lopez, and Lisa Trujillo are paired with historic pieces from the collection to challenge the viewers’ experience with beauty by unveiling the complicated story that accompanies it.
This exhibition features Wildfire Season in the Southwest by Kat Kinnick
Wildfire Season in the Southwest emerged out of a response to the Calf Canyon/Hermits Peak fire of Early April through late June 2022, the largest and most destructive wildfire in modern New Mexico history which burned 341,471 acres in the southern Sangre de Cristo Mountains in San Miguel, Mora & Taos counties, and destroyed almost 1,000 structures including homes and threatening 12,000 more. The Spring of 2022 was one of the warmest and driest, as the megadrought in the American Southwest intensified.
On August 21st, it was announced that the fire was a hundred percent contained. The news was celebrated, though the aftereffects of the fire continue to be devastating. After the dry spell came the incessant monsoon rains unleashing deadly flash floods. New Mexico’s state historian, Rob Martinez, said, “The Calf Canyon/Hermits Peak Fire burned down a way of life that’s lasted hundreds of years.”
Lapis Room. Albuquerque, New Mexico, USA
The Heart Show
February 1 - March 17, 2024
The heart is one of the most immediately recognizable shapes throughout the world transcending generations and cultures. How did this simple shape come to represent such an incredibly complicated (maybe the most complicated) concept? How does the encapsulate so many themes of love?
The Heart is….
A Symbol of romantic love
A Symbol of carnal love
A Symbol of platonic love
A Symbol of familial love
A Symbol of sweetness
A Symbol of self-love
A Symbol of one’s love of place
A Symbol of cosmic connectivity
A Symbol of agricultural prosperity
A Symbol of courage
A Symbol of the eternity
We invite you to explore the . The show will consist of large-scale works by David Santiago and miniature pieces by a talented roster of Albuquerque-based artists:
Margarita Paz-Pedro // ceramics
Eric Romero // painting
Rachel Tapia // painting
Selina Baca // Desert Goddess Jewelry
Noé Barnett // painting
Luis Contreras // sculpture
Beedallo // mixed media + painting
Vanessa Alvarado // painting
Kat Kinnick (Santa Fe) // painting
Nikki Zabicki // painting
Kyle Maier // painting
Leah Prada Harrison // Yoté Jewelry + painting
Roe LiBretto // painting
Kyle Velez // painting
Hecho A Mano. Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA
Sophisticated Tenderness, solo exhibition
Sept 29 - Oct 23, 2023
“Our greatest threat is indifference,” says painter, illustrator, printmaker and ceramicist Kat Kinnick. “Gentleness and cooperation are guides, whether it be protecting the water and wild animals, raising a family, or the softness inside of ourselves and our closest loved ones.” This theme of tenderness and care informed Kinnick’s upcoming show at Hecho a Mano. Her prints and oil paintings feature animals—many of them young and vulnerable—and people in gestures of surrender to the inevitability of nature. “The prints are centered around letting yourself love, and letting go—loving despite the potential loss and risk,” Kinnick says. “They’re also about celebrating cuteness, tenderness and beauty in nature, and likewise, inside ourselves.”
Some of the prints illustrate figures and events from the artist’s life. One print, called Says Phoebe, shows birds that built a nest on her porch. Another depicts a girl crying in the rain, which Kinnick says “is based on a moment when I felt at a loss and the weight of the world was too much and I sat outside in a lightning storm and let myself be drenched by the rain.” The show will also include functional ceramics and ceramic sculptures: a first for Kinnick’s exhibitions. She studied interdisciplinary sculpture at the Maryland Institute College of Art, exploring mediums from bronze casting, to woodworking, to weaving. She describes the process of sculpting animals for her new show as a tactile understanding: “It’s been such an exciting process of discovery, and also a new relationship to the forms—I get to touch, hug and hold them.” Her subjects, the plants and animals of northern New Mexico, are familiar to her.“ As an artist, there’s solidarity in the fact that animals and land don’t use verbal language to communicate, and we have to be patient and gentle to hear them,” Kinnick says. “My art creates a world where animals are reflections of our inner landscape.” To Kinnick, tenderness means nurturing a relationship to other beings—and to yourself—that “softens, awakens, pays attention to and is curious… it’s one of the most sophisticated, grounded qualities,” she says. “The presence of nature offers clarity. Nature tells us who we are, and asks us to take these gems we’ve found inside ourselves to share with the world. Each person has the capacity to find different gems.”
Kinnick’s part-time job restoring Navajo rugs informs her understanding of color. “I have to mix yarns together to match the colors in the rugs in the spots I’m re-weaving, and the practice has really inspired a heightened color sensitivity,” she says. The themes Kinnick has explored in her past shows at Hecho a Mano, Abundance/Impermanence and A Culture of Wilderness, are still relevant to her work, but now, she’s more keenly focused on relationships than individual beings. “I’ve always been a fan of dualities and complements: loss and love, cute and fierce, harmony and dissonance. As an artist, it’s my world—I can create whatever and whoever I want, the energies and personalities, and the stories I long for.” Her new exhibition is inspired by the strength it takes to be sensitive. “The animals look at you, you are seen by them, and they ask you to, likewise, see them,” Kinnick says. “The world is asking for you to listen, and each of our wild, timeless souls inside of us are asking us to listen.” Sophisticated Tenderness will open at Hecho a Mano on Friday, September 29, and will be on view through October 23.
Lapis Room. Albuquerque, New Mexico, USA
Heliotropism: Turning Toward the Light
Sept 28 - Nov 26, 2023
A select group of Southwest’s best let their work be permeated by the idea of Heliotropism: a phenomenon that plants and animals move toward the light of the sun throughout the day. More remarkably, when the sun is tucked deep within the clouds, the sun-seeking beings often look toward each other for light.
Hecho A Mano. Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA
Abundance/Impermanence, solo exhibition
July 1 - July 31, 2022
Kinship, dreaming, unearthing, wisdom, listening, timelessness: Kat Kinnick held these themes in mind while creating the paintings in her new solo exhibition, Abundance / Impermanence, which depicts the plants and animals of New Mexico. Her paintings are composed of gouache on paper, which Kinnick sees as an immediate medium, able to capture fleeting encounters, ethereal moments, and ways of existing rich with beauty.
Kinnick grew up in Los Ranchos de Albuquerque, and moved to Baltimore where she received a BFA at the Maryland Institute College of Art. She was drawn back to New Mexico by her love of the landscape and wilderness. In this show, she used the pastel pinks and yellows of the earth, the deep purples and blues of the mountains, and the sage greens that tint the plants here in New Mexico. She is inspired by the beauty and austerity of the state’s ecology: “The hardcore/punk spikey tenacious nature of the plants,” she says.
“The paintings emerge from a love of wildlife and craft, and a reverence for the natural world,” Kinnick shares. “The work is hoping to inspire the viewer to approach nature with a curiosity, a sense of abundant beauty and feeling of being at home and belonging with nature.” Kinnick sees art as a way for humans to participate in what animals and plants experience naturally: “Quieting the mind, noticing connections that you missed, and heightening your senses as you feel at home in the world. Animals and plants seem to remember and hold wisdom of the ancient, and don't forget by being distracted by newness like we are.”
Through her paintings, she accesses an imaginative process of making connections and engaging with senses that the rational, literal world cannot. Her goal in creating a painting is to find what speaks to her and create a work that resonates and sings from those elements. She revels in art that engages the audience as a massage for the soul, an invaluable experience in today’s world. “What are we going to do throughout this time of losing species, ecologies and wilderness untouched by humans?” Kinnick asks. “Poetry and art access the places we need to retrieve. I want people to have their kinship with animals and plants enhanced through my work and through the use of functional objects of craft.”
Hecho A Mano. Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA
A Culture of Wilderness, solo exhibition
Opening February 28, 2020
Depicting wildlife and wilderness of the high desert of New Mexico, Kat Kinnick works to create a culture of fondness & connectedness to our natural world. The artist says, “creating culture through art is like creating a value system. My work represents my heart and my values. I feel that if we paid better attention to our wild plants and animals, and were more connected to them, then we’d live in a healthier world.”
Form & Concept Gallery. Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA
MIRROR BOX | Strangers Collective
February 23 - April 14, 2018
Kyle Farrell, Alex Gill and Jordan Eddy, co-directors of Strangers Collective and the No Land art space, curate this exhibition of emerging artists and writers at form & concept. The show engages a network of early career creatives, anchored in Santa Fe and spiraling across the nation. Its curatorial throughline presents a radical method for reflecting on place and identity through art objects.
The term “mirror box” originates in the medical field: Vilayanur S. Ramachandran invented the box with two back-to-back mirrors in the center to help amputees manage phantom limb pain. The patient places the “good” limb into one side, and the “residual” limb into the other, making mirrored movements that can trick the brain into believing that it’s moving the phantom limb. “It’s a tribute to the incredible power of grey matter,” says Eddy. “If our minds are capable of conjuring a nervous system from thin air, can we link up with people, places or things in the same visceral but invisible way?” The curatorial team realized that art, like the mirror box, can act as a conduit for this type of transcendent—but also highly tangible—experience.
“As we turned over the idea of a ‘mirror box’ in conversation, its meaning evolved to represent a sort of theoretical art object,” says Farrell. “If you imagine a cube made from mirrors floating in a landscape, it reflects you and your surroundings across six different planes. By peering into it, you begin view identity and place in novel ways.” The show’s participants interact with the world in a similar fashion, reflecting, filtering and distorting their varied contexts to create visions of the world that are requisitely imbued with their own experiences.
NO LAND Gallery. Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA
Ruminations & Remnants
A pop-up exhibition of illustrations & prints by Kat Kinnick & Zahra Marwan
July 22 - August 6, 2017
Kat Kinnick and Zahra Marwan met just a few months ago, and exhibited together for the first time in late June. The joint show was in a red barn at the Rio Grande Community Farm in Albuquerque, with illustrations and prints hanging from the rafters and pinned to alfalfa bales. In a new version of the pop-up exhibition, Kinnick and Marwan travel from the humble farm to a gallery on the Santa Fe Plaza. Though they’ve landed in a more traditional art venue, the artists maintain a down-to-earth philosophy about their work. Both of them blend natural imagery with personal narratives, seeking to connect with diverse audiences. Ruminations & Remnants opens at Strangers Collective’s No Land on Saturday, July 22 from 6-9 pm. The show’s closing reception on Sunday, August 6 features Albuquerque acoustic trio Lone Piñon.
“It started at the farmer’s market,” says Kinnick. That’s where Marwan sells her illustrations, and Kinnick’s partner Jordan Wax sometimes performs with his band Lone Piñon. “Zahra saw an album cover I designed for Lone Piñon, and reached out to me to do a show,” Kinnick recalls. “She told me that she makes art as her living. I was like, ‘How does this person do this?’” They became fast friends, and have supported each other in their early careers as professional artists.“Kat calls herself an ‘in the closet’ artist, but since we did the last show she’s been making a lot more work,” says Marwan. “She’s inspired me a lot in so many ways as well.”
Kinnick grew up in Albuquerque, and her parents restore Navajo rugs. She studied art at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore. Even in her time away from the high desert, she made paintings of New Mexico’s flora and fauna. Now living in Santa Fe, she continues to depict the natural world with the intention of bringing viewers back in touch with the wild. She works in watercolor and gouache to bring plants and animals to life on paper and board. “Creating culture is like creating a value system,” she says. “My work represents my heart and my values. I feel like if we knew animals and plants better, and were more connected to them, then we’d live in a healthier world.”
Marwan was born in Kuwait, and moved to Albuquerque with her family when she was a child. Now an American citizen, she has traveled back and forth several times in the past few years to visit family. Her watercolor-and-ink illustrations capture everyday moments in both places, highlighting differences and similarities between the two cultures that Marwan moves between. Other drawings feature charming portraits of her friends, or scenes from her travels across the world. “I search for certain things that I remember, and invent things as well,” Marwan says. “I blend together real experiences with things that I imagine. Drawing helps gets these things out.”
When it comes to selling their work, both artists prioritize accessibility. “At the market, some people are like, ‘You shouldn’t be selling your art at a place like this!’” Marwan says. “I’m like, ‘Why can’t it be sold like tomatoes?’”
At the show’s closing reception on Sunday, August 6, Lone Piñon—who helped connect Kinnick and Marwan—will provide music. The group has revived and updated the Chicano stringband style that once flourished in New Mexico, bringing a devoted and explosive musicianship to Northern New Mexican polkas and chotes, virtuosic Mexican huapango and son calentano, and classic borderlands conjunto. Jordan Wax, Greg Glassman and Noah Martinez are the band’s members.