Location: Oakland, CA
Medium: Video, Installation, Sculpture, Painting, Performance
Website: krhoades.com
Kate Rhoades is an interdisciplinary artist based in Oakland, California. She grew up in Ohio and earned a BFA from the Columbus College of Art and Design before relocating to the Bay Area in 2012 to attend graduate school at Mills College, where she received her MFA in 2014. Her early professional work in the region included a position as assistant registrar at the Mills College Art Museum and a role as a teaching artist at Southern Exposure in San Francisco. She was a recipient of the Jay DeFeo Prize at Mills College upon graduation, and in 2016 completed an Artist in Residence at Recology San Francisco, producing work from discarded materials scavenged from the facility’s public disposal area. In 2018, she was named a Eureka Fellow by the Fleishhacker Foundation, which supports Bay Area visual artists at mid-career.
Rhoades’s work has been screened at the San Francisco International Film Festival and the Santa Fe International New Media Festival and has been exhibited at the San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art, the Buffalo Institute for Contemporary Art, Trestle Gallery in Brooklyn, and galleries across the Bay Area. Press coverage has appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle, KQED Arts, the East Bay Express, artnet news, Art Practical, and Art21 Magazine. Since 2014 she has co-hosted Congratulations Pine Tree, a Bay Area arts and culture podcast, and she has maintained an ongoing music project under the name Shallow Marsh.
Rhoades works across video, sculpture, installation, painting, and performance, frequently combining these modes within a single project. Her practice probes the absurdity of the commercial, academic, and institutional facets of art through humor, slapstick, puppetry, and deadpan lecturing. She deploys cartoon logic and theatrical over-acting to expose the invisible hierarchies embedded in cultural institutions — making institutional critique legible without defanging it. Her ongoing video series Required Skimming (2013–ongoing), a planned 300-part project illustrating canonical art theory texts by figures including Susan Sontag, Roland Barthes, Rosalind Krauss, and Walter Benjamin, applies this approach directly to the language that defines the art world itself.
Her research-driven projects center on the interconnected histories of subjugation shared by animals, queer humans, and mythological human-animal hybrids. Works often ask viewers to participate physically — mounting interactive sculptures, following podcasts through space, or enacting vulnerable postures — turning passive spectatorship into a form of embodied complicity. Whether revisiting the 1901 anarchist assassination of President McKinley, retelling the Greek myth of the centaurs through a queer feminist lens, or tracing the connections between the SOMA leather community and the cattle industry, Rhoades consistently locates unexpected alignments between seemingly distant systems of power.
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