Kate Kretz grew up in upstate NY, and spent several years living abroad in France, first at age 9, then again at age 18. She earned a Cours De La Civilization Française certificate at The Sorbonne while working as an aupair for a prominent French family. She returned to the states to earn a BFA at the State University of New York at Binghamton before receiving her MFA from University of Georgia.
Kretz was trained as a painter, but creates across media disciplines. Recent work includes human hair embroideries, dense, obsessive, bas-relief cotton floss embroideries, acrylic paintings on black cotton velvet, pyrography, highly wrought oil and acrylic paintings and tiny silverpoint drawings on found silver objects. Generally focused on creating time-intensive work telling difficult truths, recent series have addressed superficialities of the art world, vulnerabilities of motherhood, and psychological fragility. Her 2012 solo exhibition, This Sharp World, at Hardcore Art Contemporary Space in Miami was reviewed in The Huffington Post, El Nuevo Herald, Art Districts magazine, and was Elisa Turner’s “Critic’s Pick for the Summer of 2012” on ArtCircuits.com, and Desirée Almodovar’s “Editor’s Pick” for Flavorpill.com. Presently, Kate is deeply engaged in a well-researched, monumental project that will be completed in late 2016 / early 2017.
Kretz’s work has appeared in over 95 international newspapers and has been featured repeatedly in the New York Times, The Washington Post, The Miami Herald, The Atlanta Journal/Constitution, ArtPapers, and Surface Design, as well as appearing in Esquire, Vanity Fair Italy, ELLE Japon, and PASAJES DISENO magazines. Her controversial painting, “Blessed Art Thou”, was covered by hundreds of international news sources, and continues to be published in magazines and university textbooks worldwide, almost a decade later.
Exhibitions include the Museum of Arts & Design, Van Gijn Museum, Kunstraum Kreuzberg, Academy of Arts & Design at Tsinghua University in Beijing, Wignall Museum, Katonah Museum, Frost Art Museum, Fort Collins MOCA, Telfair Museum, Fort Lauderdale Museum, the Museo Medici, San Jose Museum of Quilts & Textiles, as well as Lyons Wier Ortt & 31Grand Gallery in NY, Chelsea Galleria and Hardcore Art Contemporary Space in Miami, and Packer/Schopf in Chicago.
She has received the MD Council For The Arts Grant, NC Arts Council Grant, The South Florida Cultural Consortium Fellowship, The Florida Visual Arts Fellowship, a Millay Colony Residency, and was a 2013 Trawick Prize Finalist. After working as an Associate Professor and BFA Director at Florida International University for ten years, she currently works in her studio while giving workshops and lectures at various universities. Her work can also be seen on Flickr, and Facebook.
STATEMENT
“One of the functions of art is to strip us bare, reminding us of the fragility common to every being, across continents and centuries.
The repetitive act of embroidery seems to be made for calming worry… trying to tie things down, sew them in, make them stay. My work functions simultaneously as a healing prayer, an incantation, and a beautiful gut punch.
I consider the inordinate amount of time invested in each piece as a gift given to the viewer. It often feels as though the earnest, cathectic things I make are an act of profound resistance: I give birth to the tactile as I am swallowed by the virtual. I obsess over craft as our world becomes disposable. I wield emotion in its messiness because it’s uncool. I work until my hands shake, because the world does not care.
I am banging my head against the wall, but the stain is beautiful.”
KATE KRETZ 