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Caroline Kent received a B.A. from Illinois State University and an M.F.A. from the University of Minnesota. From 2000 to 2002, she lived in Alba Iulia, Romania, as a Peace Corps Volunteer. She is an Associate Professor in the Art, Theory, and Practice department at Northwestern University.
Her practice developed through an open-ended archive of improvisational works on paper; the paintings built out of this context exist in multiple forms, including drawings, sculpture, and performance. She labors to expand the discourse of modernist abstraction by questioning how language might operate in unknown and ever-evolving conditions. The work moves from surface and frame to environment and architecture through acts of translation from one medium to the next.
Kent is a 2025 USA Fellow and a recipient of the Aspen Arts Prize for innovation in painting. She has received grants from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, The McKnight Foundation, and Jerome Foundation. She was a 2020 Artadia Chicago Awardee and a 2021 Joyce Alexander Wein Prize recipient from the Studio Museum in Harlem.
Recent exhibitions include La Trienal at El Museo del Barrio, New York, and Ancestral at the Museum of Brazilian Art (M.A.B.), Sao Paulo, Brazil. Kent has shown at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, MoMA, MCA Chicago, the New Orleans Museum of Art, The Art Institute of Chicago, Hill Art Foundation, BAMPFA, the Queens Museum, and the Walker Art Center.
Artwork Above: Biting one’s lip, arranging the cuff on a sleeve, 2025; Acrylic on Belgian linen, ebonized walnut, pigmented cement; 36 × 32 × 1 1/2 in.
Organized by the Department of Art and Art History. Supported by the UC Davis College of Letters and Science.