About

Kate VanVliet (she/her) is a multi-disciplinary artist based in Philadelphia, PA. She is a Director of BYO Printmaking Collaborative, a nonprofit community printshop, that she co-founded in 2010 as an artist collective. In 2007, she received a BFA in Fine Arts from Moore College of Art & Design. She was a resident at Vermont Studio Center in 2017 and was the 2018-2019 printmaker in residence at Cheltenham Arts Center. In 2022, VanVliet co-curated Solastalgia: Redefining Home in Precarious Times, presented at SGCI: Our Shared Future, in Madison, WI. Her work is in numerous collections including The Free Library of Philadelphia, Zuckerman Museum of Art, William Penn Foundation, Bowes Art & Architecture Library at Stanford University and Moore College of Art & Design. She teaches printmaking at Cheltenham Arts Center, and offers tutoring at BYO Print. She is represented by Paradigm Gallery + Studio.

Found and collected materials are the main component of my work - graphic elements of etchings and physical building blocks of sculptures and installations. The practice of print-making, multiplicity, and repeated action brings a curated specificity to found object artwork’s potential for chaos. Leftovers of daily routines that accumulate over time, and personal collections of friends, family, and strangers serve as my materials because of their innate ability to oscillate between the mundane and the precious. Routine’s transformation into ritual and what is left from that metamorphosis becomes the source of much of these collections; eggshells, dull sharps, melted candles, empty produce netting, clippings of hair, wilting plants, stained tea bags, old spoons have all become fodder for the studio. Self-iteratively, print proofs, cut-off bits of copper, wire, and wood get recirculated into the supply chain to create a regenerative feedback loop as they get matched with new material.