Katherine Craig is a practicing artist, curator, photographer and writer living and working in Detroit.  Born the daughter of an Italian immigrant in 1983, she received a B.F.A. from the College for Creative Studies in 2008.  She received the North End Community + Public Arts Grant in the summer of 2009 for the creation of “The Illuminated Mural,” a site-specific, community and urban-studies project.  The mural was granted the Visual Artists Rights Act (VARA), which protects works of art from removal.  Her installations and community activism is prevalent in Detroit’s landscape.  She also founded the North End Studio in 2009, where she served as Creative Director for five years.  The studio, gallery and event space provided an outlet for working artists in Detroit.

While Katherine’s artwork is colorful on the surface, a deeper look shows a brilliant pose that she stands.  In 2012, she was selected to show the installation “Flooding Rosa Parks” in the Center Galleries at College for Creative Studies.  As an observational study, the installation seemed frozen in time.  Katherine uses objects to re-interpret reality with configurations of personal accounts.  Paintings that interact with architectural space recreate experiences of disasters, floods, the fall of the housing market, post-industrial depression, piled rubble and boarded-up windows.  Her work denotes the physical equating of value she observes and documents with photography.  She has worked in the realm of sound installation, photography, light, performance, movement, time-based practice and found objects that depict in her instillations and carry counter-culture connotative meaning.  She holds dialog about cultural signifiers, semiotics and symbolic object representation.  Seeking truth in reality and history, her independent object-studies embark on re-interpretation, deconstructing social constructs and value systems.  Her installations use compositions in space to make visual statements about the world in which we live.  With dedication to a vision, Katie creates environments to experience. 

The avid art supporter, advocate, collector and art enthusiast is a M.F.A. candidate in the sculpture program at the Cranbrook Academy of Art.  Katie is known for her installations, ephemeral time-based practice, performance-based elements and paintings that interact with architecture.  Her work is prevalent in mark making, actions and abstraction.  She looks forward to the future of her artwork and cultural studies.