Kate Clark (artist)


Kate Clark is an American artist who works across public art, studio art, and installation. Her public art has focused on the coexistence of life forms in locations such as tree trunks and city blocks through installations, experiential storytelling, urban studies, ethnography, and collaboration with communities including archaeologists and landscape designers. Her work explores the evolving interpretations of old objects and their meanings.

Early life

Clark grew up in Anacortes, Washington. Through her parents receiving Fulbright Teaching grants as High School teachers, her family lived in Istanbul, Turkey in 1994-1995, and Brno, Czech Republic in 2003-2004, and was exposed to folklore and archaeological sites that informed her interest in local history and storytelling. While in Brno she studied at the Luzanky School of Art and the Studio Lavka photography studio.

Education

Clark went to Evergreen State College for a BA in Studio Arts, studying abroad at The Pont Aven School of Contemporary Art, Pont Aven, France. After graduating in 2009, she studied with master ink painter Tousui Tanaka in Tokyo, Japan.
Clark went to the University of California, San Diego for a Masters of Fine Arts in Interdisciplinary Public Art, graduating in 2017, studying abroad for an "Urbianisms of Inclusion" fellowship at Università Iuav di Venezia in Italy, and at an urban design and architecture school at Bauhaus University, Weimar.

Work

Kate Clark’s art work has involved storytelling practices, research, and engagement with landscape design, archaeology, urban studies, and sculpture, with projects at the National Museum of Natural History of the Smithsonian Institution, the Bauhaus Institute Weimar, NgBK Berlin, The Oakland Museum of California, Bellevue Arts Museum, The Olympic Sculpture Park, and 4Culture.
The themes of Clark’s sculptures have included reinterpreting gender representations in art history, and the morphing of the female form in sculpture, such as the Venus of Willendorf and the Virgin Mary, and exploring feminized crafts and techniques, such as the Nordic countries tradition of rose painting or rosemaling.

Parkeology

While Clark was working with the San Diego Art Institute, she organized “Parkeology,” collectively authored, community history projects and art installations at Balboa Park, "designed to uncover little-known aspects of the park’s places and institutions.”

Public Art and Planning

Clark is an art commissioner for the Seattle Design Commission, and served as a Community Engagement Artist in Residence for Seattle Public Utilities and the Seattle Office of Arts and Culture. From 2021-2024, she developed a ten year public art plan for the electricity utility Seattle City Light.

Teaching

Clark has taught at the University of San Diego, George Washington University, and The Anacortes Museum and guest lectured at University of Chicago, Bauhaus University, Weimar, Bellevue Arts Museum, and University of California, San Diego.

Selected exhibitions

Solo shows

Selected group shows

Selected publications

  • Kate Clark and David Serlin. "Materializing Disability and Queerness in Three Objects". In, Turning Archival: The Life of the Historical in Queer Studies, Daniel Marshall and Zeb Tortorici, Date University Press, 2022 Queen’s Circle: Cruising Oral Histories of Balboa Park, Burn All Books Press, 2019
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Collections