Bio/Exhibitions

ART:

Donna Kuhn is a multi-media artist working in visual and video art, dance, poetry and sound. She has exhibited her fine art and crafts at Art With A Heart Gallery, Fort Collins Museum of Contemporary Arts, Wilder Nightingale Gallery, Taos Digital Art Show, Taos Art in Town Hall Exhibit, Sustaining Culture, Moxie, Imagine if, The Question Mark Gallery, Mudra Gallery, The Santa Cruz Art League, The Mountain Arts Center, First and Second Annual Santa Cruz Digital Arts Festival, Indies Art Cafe,The Mill Gallery, Santa Cruz Mask Festival, Walnut Avenue Womens Center, Crafters by the Sea and the Santa Cruz Office of County Education.

Born in New York in 1959, Donna left California after thirty years and now resides in Taos, New Mexico. She has studied art at The University of Maryland, Sonoma State University, Santa Rosa Junior College and Cabrillo College is a past member of The Santa Cruz Art League, The Northern California Association of Art Therapists and The International Expressive Therapy Institute. In addition, she has an adult education credential and has taught art to seniors in nursing homes and retirement centers. She received an award for outstanding work for a graphic medium by a regional women's journal, Women's Voices.

Her visual art includes drawing, painting, mask making, doll making, wearable art, jewelry, collage, monoprinting and altered books. In addition, her art has been published widely in print and online literary magazines such as Exquisite Corpse, sidereality, Generator Press, The Digital Artist, Sendecki, xstream, Manifold Press, Poesy, Kung Fu,The Art Project, Thunder Sandwich, Ken Again, Churn, Poems Niedergnasse, Ten Thousand Monkeys, eratio, Global Collage and Tin Lustre Mobile. She has illustrated covers for a few of her own poetry books.

She is represented by Art With A Heart Gallery in Seattle.

"American artist Kuhn delivers riveting portraits imbued with a radicalized vulnerability, at times violent strokes and colours, contrasted with a soft, soulful gaze." Louise Pharand, Toronto

VIDEO:

Donna's experimental videos have been shown at Tether (London), Open Video Conference, (New York),Cinema Feministe Program at Cinema Zavod Udarnik, Maribor,Slovenia, ISEA (Germany) Künstlerhaus k/haus Kino, Vienna, Austria, Vox Feminae 4, Zagreb, Croatia  The Coexist Galleries (London) Idea 13, The Disposable Film Festival, The New York Independent Film and Video Festival, The Santa Cruz Digital Arts Festival, The Mountain Arts Center, The 418 Project and online at DVblog, PostVideo Art, Disturb The Peace TV, Hyperrhiz, City Gallery, ArtFemTV, Moving Poems, Oregon Literary Review, Mad Hatter's Review, City Gallery and Harvard's Infinity Show/Visual Poetry, Unlikely Stories, Perpetual Art Machine, Qarrtsiluni, Hyperriz, Papertiger Media and Moving Poems.

Statement

I make art because that is the only way life makes sense to me. A recurrent theme in my work is the face: semi-abstract, colorful and emotional. I don't choose to draw these faces. Their forms just come to me. They jump off the page and stare at you. Dare to stare back. I have tried to choose between media. I cannot. I feel fully engaged and alive when I'm creating. I'm a maker of images more than a storyteller. My work is about being a woman and an outsider. It has been described as playful, haunting, bold, whimsical, colorist, sad, poetic, mysterious and tense.  Influences include Picasso, Dubuffet, Klee and outsider art.