Caroline Kent,
Assistant Professor,

Caroline Kent is a Chicago based visual artist that explores the relationship between language, translation and abstraction through an expanded painting practice. Developed through an ongoing archive of works on paper, the paintings build out of this context to exist in the multiple forms of drawings, paintings, sculpture and performance. Kent labors to expand the discourse of abstraction to include alternative logics that move beyond surface and frame through each act of translation, from one medium to the next.

Over the last few years, Kent’s practice has become a kind of Gesamtkunstwerk, a total art form, becoming an articulation of space, matter, and time through architectures, objects and performances. Past exhibitions have included movement-based troupes as well as dancers who have built choreography from the forms of specific artworks. Exhibitions have become full-space involved installations. Wooden shapes extend beyond and outside of the paintings, cornices and walls bend to buttress these portals, and the vocabulary of forms has begun to produce a choreography for bodies navigating these new worlds. The production of objects has been transformed from a conflation of perception of a particular time and place to an unfolding universe of becoming. Bringing out forms that exist within the painting to the outside of the painting is a simultaneous moment of translation and transformation. Kent’s work considers that an abstract language beckons a context that speaks to other material and immaterial forms in the world.

Caroline Kent (b. 1975) received a B.A. at Illinois State University (1998) and received her M.F.A. from The University of Minnesota (2008). Kent has exhibited nationally at The Flag Art Foundation, NY, The Walker Art Center, MN, The Depaul Art Museum, Chicago, The California African American Museum, LA, The Suburban, Chicago, and The Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago.

Kent has received grants from The Pollock Krasner Foundation, The McKnight Foundation and The Jerome Foundation. In 2018, she was a Paint School fellow, a New York based program of Shandaken Projects. Most recently she is a 2020 Artadia Foundation Chicago Awardee.

Kent's work is in the collections of the Walker Art Center, MN and The Art Institute of Chicago and is represented by Kohn Gallery based in Los Angeles.

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