Kim Russo

Kim Russo is a practicing artist who has an extensive career in education and the arts. She has served as a gallery director, college professor, department chair, and associate provost at the University of Louisiana, Whittier College, College of Santa Fe, Ringling College of Art and Design, and CalArts, and most recently served as dean of graduate studies and interim provost at Otis College of Art and Design. Russo has also worked as a public orientation educator at MOCA/Los Angeles and an artful weekends assistant manager at the Getty, and she wrote art criticism and gallery reviews for the Albuquerque Journal North and The New Mexican/Pasatiempo in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Kim Russo’s works-on-paper are cautionary tales that reference the complexities of contemporary America. Her current and ongoing work and research references 19th century ideas about manifest destiny and transcendentalism as avenues for critiquing their colonialist and corporatized relationships with nature in America 200 years after the Hudson River School artists painted the American landscape. Her work also explores the symbiotic practices and philosophies of Native people that were eliminated by white settlement, and the disparity between Native and colonialist relationships with the natural world.

Russo’s work is in the permanent collections of the Hilliard Art Museum, the New Mexico Museum of Art and the Cornell Fine Arts Museum, as well as notable private collections. She has received residency fellowships from the Lenz Foundation, Caldera, the Atlantic Center for the Arts, and Americans for the Arts.