Location: Berkeley, CA
Medium: Embroidery, drawing, painting
Website: kimbennett.net
Kim Bennett was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1976. She earned a BFA from the Cooper Union in New York in 1999 and an MFA from California College of the Arts in San Francisco in 2013. She has lived and worked in the Bay Area since her graduate studies, settling in Berkeley, where she continues to make work and teach.
Bennett received the Toby Devan Lewis Fellowship from California College of the Arts in 2013 and a Kala Parent Artist Fellowship from Kala Art Institute in Berkeley in 2015. Early in her career, her project The Art of Pure Pleasure was commissioned by Creative Time and presented by Haagen-Dazs at the Armory Show in New York in 2003. She has held solo exhibitions at Gallery 16 in San Francisco, Conduit Gallery in Dallas, and pied-à-terre in San Francisco, and her work has appeared in group exhibitions at Bedford Gallery, Berkeley Art Center, Root Division, Interface Gallery, and Heron Arts, among other venues. She is a Senior Adjunct Professor at California College of the Arts, where she teaches in the Illustration program, and has previously taught at San Francisco Art Institute, City College of San Francisco, and Berkeley Art Museum.
Bennett is represented by Gallery 16 in San Francisco. Her recent work includes a long-running collaboration with artist Jeremy Ehling under the name Ehling/Bennett, shown at Interface Gallery in Oakland and NADA New York, and a 2020 public art commission, Improve Each Shining Hour, installed along Berryman Path in Berkeley’s Live Oak Park as part of the Intersections project. She has also self-published writing, including the zine Love Is Real (2004).
Bennett’s primary material is thread: her embroidered canvases and works on linen and cotton combine hand-stitching with dye, India ink, acrylic wash, and marker, layering colorful, gestural stitched forms over painted or drawn grounds. Drawing on a family history of quilting, she treats needlework as both a structural and durational practice — a way of tracking the passage of time through repetitive, handmade marks. Her larger works on paper, made in archival ink on Stonehenge paper, extend the same interest in grid, pattern, and repetition into a more graphic, linear register, while her public and collaborative projects (with Ehling, and in community-facing works like Intersections) carry the same sensibility for accumulated, patient handwork out into shared and outdoor space.
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