Kennedy Yanko
Kennedy Yanko is that rare thing: a female metalworker who experiments with traditionally masculine ways of making art. An artist who thrives when defying expectations, she combines hard and soft materials—scrap metal together with membranes of dried paint that she calls “paint skins”—to arrive at three-dimensional sculptures that shift depending on the viewer’s perspective. Her hybrid objects not only trick the eye with respect to their materials; by doing so, they also push abstraction into genuinely novel terrain.
“In the way that my work chooses how it wants to be seen, [that] is also indicative of what I perceive identity to be,” Yanko has said, “it’s a choice, it’s changeable, and it’s something that we have to keep questioning.” As an African-American artist at a historical crossroads, Yanko remains determined to start new conversations about the shifting nature of beauty and identity. Her abstract sculptures consistently examine gender and race as stubborn social constructs, while also challenging the neutrality of American-style abstraction to carry forward meaningful social critique.
— CVF, USFCAM
“We're witnessing a resurgence of people really looking, and looking differently, at what's before us—lifting the veil, reexamining the inner workings of our processes, and confronting the raw truths that they reveal. In my work, I'm constantly exploring ways of seeing and reconsidering how I speak about my process. It's essential to capturing the phenomenon of regeneration that I'm so fascinated by.”
— Kennedy Yanko
Artist Kennedy Yanko. Photo by Mike Vitelli.
About Kennedy Yanko
(St. Louis, Missouri, 1988)
She lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.
Kennedy Yanko works primarily with found objects and paint. Her work deals with the ambiguities of perception and emphasizes the importance of abstraction as a means to developing an intuitive sight akin to critical thinking. In 2019, Yanko debuted three solo shows—Highly Worked, Denny Dimin Gallery (New York, NY); Hannah, Kavi Gupta Gallery (Chicago, IL); and Before Words, Urban Institute for Contemporary Art (Grand Rapids, MI)—and installed her first public sculpture, 3 WAYS, on the Poydras Corridor in New Orleans in collaboration with The Helis Foundation and the Ogden Museum of Art. Her latest exhibition, Salient Queens, is set to open at Vielmetter, Los Angeles, in September 2020. Her work is included in the corporate collections of JP Morgan Chase and TD Bank. Yanko was named Art Forum’s “Critic’s Pick” and was featured in 100 Sculptors of Tomorrow (Thames & Hudson, 2019).
Artist website: kennedyyanko.com
Artist Instagram: @kennedyyanko
Studio Instagram: @kennedyyankostudio