About
Kat Peace, Ph.D., is an abstract painter working in acrylic and oil. Raised in New York City, via the Caribbean, and South America, and has spent a lifetime absorbing art in its most serious forms: museums, galleries, the visual culture of a city that treats art as both luxury and necessity. That education never stopped. It just eventually demanded its own outlet in her life.
Before canvas, there were faces. For well over a decade, Kat worked as a professional makeup artist in New York City, at MAC Cosmetics, in editorial and fashion contexts, across bridal, body painting, special effects, and the charged atmosphere of fashion week. She learned color the way painters learn it: by doing it, by feeling what a combination does to a room, by understanding that the wrong pairing is forgettable and the right one changes everything. That instinct moved to canvas and never left.
Now an Assistant Professor and Researcher based in the Midwest, this creates a generative tension with everything that shaped her. Kat has found in the slower pace something New York rarely offers: time, space, and the conditions to make work seriously. She has her own studio space, dedicated to painting, thinking, and practicing.
Her abstractions are painted from the inside out, from cultural memory and longing, from the transnational experience of being rooted in many places and fully at home in none, from the specific beauty of the Caribbean and the specific energy of the urban. They are made in color that does not apologize, in textures that reward closeness, in compositions that resist the tidy and the expected. Her work is not made for everyone. It is made for the person who stands in front of it and recognizes something they didn't know they were looking for. Kat's art is for the processor.
Kat Peace is an early emerging voice in fine art abstraction, and honest about where she is in that journey, and clear about where it's going. Kat Peace is a MFA student at Clark University, where she is earning her masters degree in Visual Arts.