Lenhardt Lecture: Caroline Kent

Kent, an associate professor in the Art, Theory, and Practice department at Northwestern University, was born in Sterling, Illinois in 1975, earning a Bachelor of Arts from Illinois State University and a Master of Fine Arts from the University of Minnesota. From 2000 to 2002, she lived in Alba Iulia, Romania, as a Peace Corps volunteer.

Kent’s work explores the limits of language and the process of translation through an expanded painting practice.

Developed through an open-ended archive of improvisational works on paper, her paintings built from this context take multiple forms, including drawings, sculpture, and performance. She labors to expand the discourse of modernist abstraction by questioning how language operates in unknown and ever-evolving conditions. Her work moves from surface and frame to environment and architecture through acts of translation from one medium to the next.

About The Lenhardt Lecture

The David and Dawn Lenhardt Lecture engages Valley audiences with some of the most acclaimed contemporary artists in the world. In 2018, the inaugural lecture presented New York-based artist Jim Hodges, and subsequent lectures have featured artists Shara Hughes, Daniel Joseph Martinez, Arcmanoro Niles, Teresita Fernández in conversation with Amalia Mesa-Bains, Derek Fordjour, Rashid Johnson, Otis Kwame Kye Quaicoe in conversation with Larry Ossei-Mensah, Leonardo Drew, Lily Stockman, Eamon Ore-Giron, Charles Gaines in conversation with Thelma Golden, and Adam Pendleton in conversation with Adrianne Edwards.