About the Artist
Kristin Kuhns is an artist whose work includes two-dimensional and three-dimensional mixed media, paintings, drawings, clay vessels, and sculptures.
Kuhns was raised in Salem, Oregon, the daughter of a forester dad and an intellectually curious domestic artist mom. After high school, she began her studio practice in the 1970s in Maui, Hawaii. She returned to Oregon in the 1980s, and received a BS degree in Art with a minor in Physical Science from Western Oregon University.
Now, after 40 years of working, exhibiting and adjunct teaching at Willamette University, Chemeketa Community College and Western Oregon University as well as fifteen years at Valley Inquiry Charter School, she is focused on her studio practice at her home in West Salem.
Our domestication of land and landscape is a recurring topic for Kuhns; her work has been influenced by her upbringing in Western Oregon and its plants, water and climate. Working in multiple media, she has often used thread in her paintings to alter what might otherwise be a predictable rendering, creating a stitched layer “mapped” onto the painting.
Kuhns’ work is in major collections in both Oregon and Hawaii including the Salem Public Library, Salem Hospital, Salem Convention Center, Hawai'i State Foundation on Culture and the Arts, Honolulu Museum of Art, and the Hui No'eau Visual Arts Center on Maui. .