Kate Kinder, MFA
Visiting Assistant Professor
Kate Kinder originates from South Central Kentucky where she received her Bachelor of Fine Arts
degree in studio art with a focus in painting; a Bachelor of Arts degree in Graphic
design; and a minor in art history from Western Kentucky University. After relocating
to Tampa, Florida, she acquired her Master of Fine Arts degree at the University of
South Florida in 2017.
As a painter and visual artist, Kinder considers the limits of linear, Western hierarchical
value structures. Her work is a culmination of tapestries, paintings, drawings, and
closed ceramic vessels. She uses the vessel as a metaphor for human empathy with no
visual access to the interior. As a mirror to the paintings themselves, the vessels
dismiss the rules of human consciousness and maintain a subject-less self. In other
work, snippets of social environments and reality TV shows bend, drip, and morph with
the visual planes of their surroundings. The figures no longer maintain visual dominance
and are consumed by patterns, objects, walls, plants, and animals. These elements
advance the boundaries of their surroundings and democratize space.
Kinder received the Carolyn M Wilson Fellowship in 2014 at the University of South
Florida and has exhibited nationally at the Tampa Museum of Art in Tampa, FL; the
Frostburg Museum Gallery in Frostburg, MD; and the Kentucky Museum Gallery in Bowling
Green, KY. Her work is in private collections in Connecticut, New York City, and Tampa
Florida, and has been awarded the 41st Las Damas De Artes Award at the Carolyn M Wilson
Gallery in 2017, and the Frame by Frame Award in 2016. Kinder instructed drawing,
painting, and foundations courses at the University of South Florida and the University
of South Florida St Petersburg from 2014 to 2019 and at Central Michigan University
from 2019 to 2021