Kate Knudsen is a painter and sculptor living in Sonoma, California. But her art is informed by a childhood lived deep in the American South. Her paintings are populated by young women and children often dressed in their Sunday best – no coincidence that Kate grew up in her mom and dad’s main street children’s clothing store.
In the work, childhood parties are crashed by the artist’s own subconscious. Religious iconography gives pause more than salvation. Empty white gowns, disembodied dolls, blindfolds, and the occasional curious lamb point to the core of Knudsen’s work: raw memory, pre-therapy.
Kate is the daughter of a Lebanese Antiochian Orthodox Christian father and a Texas-born Southern Baptist mother who landed in Vicksburg, MS. She grew up playing on Confederate battlefields and wandering through tombstones in military cemeteries.
“You know, I left the South for California but am forever dragging stuff home: pickets, rusted metal parts, religious artifacts, doll heads and other remnants that remind me of that childhood place.”
Beyond a country mailbox, her childhood place is a slightly haunted state of pure wonder.
For more information about Kate Knudsen and her life, please click here.
Exhibitions:
Celebrate, Arts Guild of Sonoma, 2017, Best in Show
Art in the Age of Anxiety, Arts Guild of Sonoma, 2018
Figure Study: Hidden Story, Healdsburg Center for the Arts, 2018
Small Works Exhibition, Artworks Downtown, San Rafael, CA 2019
Liberty, Arc Galleries, San Francisco, CA, 2019
Women in Art, Las Laguna Gallery, Laguna Beach, CA 2020
Figure it Out, Healdsburg Center for the Arts, 2020
COLLAB, 2020
Who Are You, Sebastopol Center for the Arts, 2020
Justice, Marin MOCA, Marin, CA, 2020
Fresh Art, Marin Society of Artists, 2020
Women Making Their Mark, O’Hanlon Center for the Arts, 2021
Figuring It Out, Seager Gray Gallery, 2021
Gifted, Seager Gray Gallery, 2021
Monochromatic, O’Hanlon Center for the Arts, 2022
Reverberations, Sebastopol Center for the Arts, 2022
Women Making Their Mark, O’Hanlon Center for the Arts, 2022
Four Squared, Arc Gallery, 2022
Articles:
“Artist widow of Doobie Brothers drummer delves into traumas in her paintings” by the East Bay Times