Faculty member Kristan Kennedy appointed to Warhol Foundation Board

The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts has appointed Kristan Kennedy to its Board of Directors. Kennedy is an artist, Artistic Director and Curator of Visual Art at Portland Institute for Contemporary Art (PICA), and faculty member in PNCA's Hallie Ford School of Graduate Studies.

The Foundation’s objective is to foster innovative artistic expression and the creative process by encouraging and supporting cultural organizations that in turn, directly or indirectly, support artists and their work. It is focused primarily on supporting work of a challenging and often experimental nature.

Kennedy has been involved with PICA since 1995, starting as a volunteer before being presented in the program as an artist in 2001. Kennedy served on the Board of Directors beginning in 2001 and joined the staff in 2003. Kennedy has been curating programming, artist residencies, publishing, lecturing and teaching since 2005 when she started programming visual art, multidisciplinary, performance and music for the TBA Festival, and returned PICA to a program of year round exhibitions and public programming in 2012. Kennedy is the chief architect of the Precipice Fund, PICA’s re-granting program funded by the Warhol Foundation.

Kennedy’s nationally recognized culture work includes advocacy for artists, collaborations with her peers through partner networks like Common Field, and her work advising national and international foundations and artist-run spaces. She lectures about curatorial practice and artist-centric ethics at institutions across the United States.

Kennedy's recent solo and two-person exhibitions include Ditch Projects (Springfield, 2018), Fourteen30 Contemporary (Portland, 2018), Crisp-Ellert Museum (St. Augustine, 2017), and Soloway (Brooklyn, 2014). In 2018, she was awarded the Bonnie Bronson Fellowship, and her work is in the collection of the Portland Art Museum among others. She is represented by Fourteen30 Contemporary Art.