Caroline Kent

Chicago, Illinois

Artworks shown are selected from works submitted by the artist in their grant or residency application. All works are copyright of the artist or artist’s estate.

About Caroline Kent

Caroline Kent is a Chicago-based visual artist. Kent speculates in both the potential and the limitations of language, and ultimately questions the modernist canon of abstraction. Caroline Kent earned a BS in Art at Illinois State University (1998) and an MFA at the University of Minnesota (2008). Kent has exhibited nationally at The Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; The Flag Art Foundation, NY; The DePaul Art Museum, Chicago; The California African American Museum, LA; and Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. Kent is a 2020 Artadia Chicago Awardee, and has received grants from The Pollock Krasner Foundation, The McKnight Foundation, and The Jerome Foundation. In 2018, she was a Fellow at Paint School, a New York-based program of Shandaken Projects. Kent is Assistant Professor of Art, Theory and Practice, at Northwestern University, IL. She is represented by Kohn Gallery in Los Angeles and Patron Gallery in Chicago.

Program Participation

Painters & Sculptors Grant, 2020

Website / Social Links

In my expanded painting practice, I am driven by a curiosity to discover where language, abstraction, and painting converge. Painting is not a means to an end but a beginning. I ambition to discover alternative logics to modernist endeavors—to consider how a painting language connects image to object, eludes location, and is expanded through acts of translation.”