Kate Kershenstein
MFA Candidate, Public Practice - Otis College of Art and Design
Kate Kershenstein is an artist who has worked with painting, rituals, commercial design, fashion, street marches, set design, and massive piles of stuff to create work about collective traumas, gifting and egalitizing everything. She is a co-founder of the Cake and Eat It Collective. She holds a B.A. in Studio Art, and was a recipient of an undergraduate research grant for her painting; her studies emphasized feminist and contemporary art. Kate has worked as a late-night convenience store clerk, a projectionist, a secretary, a gallery sales associate, a pizza chef, a soda fountain jerk, a museum education programs assistant, and as a department store cashier, while in the meantime gifting out thousands of items of clothes, going to meetings, making the stew for Food Not Bombs, and trying to make art about the potential for a post-hierarchy society. She was born and raised in Denver, Colorado.
The Cake and Eat It Collective creates installations, happenings, performances and visual works that deal with the underbelly of gift economy, fashion, anarchism and queer identities. Started in 2002 as a series of free stores, the C&EI then reconfigured these community based reuse projects with the Free Boutique, a yearlong, fashion forward pay-what-you-wish storefront where "shoppers" were given the full experience of a high-end boutique, but without any price tags. These experiments have further progressed to encompass an ever-expanding network of satellite boutique installations in diy venues, households, and galleries, as well as mobile fashion marches, anarchist makeovers and more runway shows in grimy warehouses than you can shake a bobbin at.
C&EI's work has also involved the use of participatory sculptures in more traditional exhibition spaces. Memorial for Federico García Lorca explored gifting as trauma amelioration via a month-long installation, wherein a temporal mausoleum was constructed and clothing and mementoes were exchanged under the auspices of memorializing the Spanish poet killed by fascists in 1936. A Curse and a Blessing, constituted a pile of accursed wrapped gifts, asking the participants to acknowledge and explore the reciprocality necessitated in enacting gift economy.
Cake and Eat It has also been involved in creating numerous collaborative processed-based performances since its inception. Louis Vuitton Night, a two year series of monthly anarchist/anarchist friendly variety shows, were nights that sought to reinvent the notion of political identity by presenting a slew of divergent local acts from a hip hop dance troupe to tango dancers, fetish performers to Janet Jackson impersonators, as well as incorporating community groups from a variety of radical social justice perspectives. This sentiment was carried on in Our Lady of the Flowers: an Experimental Opera for Jean Genet, where the cast was asked to individually interpret Jean Genet's work and present the collective with a proposed performance piece, or role, which was then woven together culminating in a piece employing eroticism, bloodletting, soundscapes, visual art, video art, dance and aria.
last updated Spring 2012