Katie Commodore “Sabrina and Brian"

Katie’s parents could have told you when she was a toddler that she would grow up to be an artist, despite years of her insisting that she was going to be an astronaut and then sending her to Space Camp twice. Never giving up her dreams of painting Martian landscapes and testing low-gravity pastels, she went to art school, which surprisingly lacked the rigorous science background NASA required. Katie attended the Maryland Institute College of Art, in Baltimore, graduating with a BFA in Illustration.  After time spent abroad, in locales including Florence, Paris, Prague, and Greece, plus a short stint in Las Vegas that is better left unspoken about, Katie returned to school, attending the Rhode Island School of Design, and earning her MFA in Printmaking. After 14 years in Brooklyn, she returned to Rhode Island to reside and is now Adjunct Faculty at her alma mater and Clark University.

As any artist would appreciate, making art is seldom a full-time profession one gets paid well for. Katie’s professional career includes working as a Studio Manager and Artist/Personal Assistant for Maya Lin, the designer of the Vietnam Memorial in Washington, DC.  She has also worked at several museums, including the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art in Connecticut, was a Majordomo for a Boutique PR Firm in NYC, and as the Administrative Director of Crux LCA, a cooperative of Black XR Creatives and Producers that focuses on Black storytelling and creating a foothold in the burgeoning vocabulary of new media of VR and creating Black wealth. Her most recent day-job was as the Personal Assistant to her childhood heroine. If you meet her, be sure to ask her about it. It’ll make your day.

She is currently represented by Untitled Space in Tribeca, NYC.

“Over the past few years, my artwork has concentrated on creating intimate portraits of my friends, often focusing on how they express their sexuality. Not whether they prefer men or women, but sexuality in the broader sense- what is it that makes them feel sexy, how do they express that physically, and how has it changed over the years? We change our clothes every season, and our physical appearance through body modification, losing weight, gaining weight, tattoos, etc; we change our kinks and sexual preferences from partner to partner, year to year.  Our sexuality, and how we feel about it, is in constant flux; the same way that we redecorate our homes, change the wallpaper and curtains, change the sheets.I try to liken this subtle change in how my friends express themselves to the way society also expresses its collective self through decorative patterns. In a roundabout way, it can be looked at as a meter of a population’s “sexuality”- the public expression of the private. Bright colors, vibrant patterns, clean lines, and minimal decoration all provide a window into the personalities that chose or created them.  Historians and anthropologists often use the decorative remnants (pots, jewelry, frescos, etc.) of past cultures to gain valuable insight into the lives of the people who created them, the same sort of cultural portrait can be drawn from our design choices today. It is very important to me that I did not come across as judgmental about my subject matter or imagery, but that they stand on their own as portraits of real people, expressing themselves how they choose.” - Katie Commodore