We are excited to announce that Kaylee Bender will be joining PlatteForum as our Spring 2025 Artist in Residence!

Kaylee Bender is a life-long artist drawn to painting, poetry, music, education, and community organizing as vehicles of liberation for the greater community. With a focus on acrylic and spray paint, she explores connection through portraiture, figurative works, and surrealist play. Inspired by jazz and the blues, her practice celebrates art as motion, liberation, and disruption. Her community engagement is centered in art’s role in building a sense of identity in community and its role in our emotional and physical well being. Her practice integrates the larger issues of loss of communal practices and freedom of expression and discusses contemporary methods of segregation based on socioeconomic status. Her intention is to make art a part of daily life for all community members: improving access to the arts on a grand scale is to permeate and disrupt the caste system, starting with the youth. Through her personal creations and community work, she hopes to foster challenging conversations regarding creation, identity, and intersectionality.

Inspired by Jazz and the blues, Kaylee Bender’s practice celebrates art as motion, liberation, and disruption. This residency will be used to explore resistance in a world that becomes increasingly more restricting to our expression. Featuring imagery associated with tarot and divination, this work encourages us to arm ourselves with the tools of knowledge, silence, stillness, action, and magic. In this residency, Kaylee is stretching beyond painting on the canvas by exploring wood working and other three-dimensional tactics to experiment with the immersive nature of installation based artwork. She will use this opportunity to build off of the canvas, playing along the intersection of collage, sculpture, and painting to create new realms that immerse the viewer in a reality centered in wisdom and self- sovereignty. In this exploration with Art Lab, we will take inspiration from the murals and people in our own neighborhood to learn more about the power of our personal histories and community that surrounds us. Working collaboratively, the Cohort will take this local inspiration to create their own large-scale, three-dimensional mural that celebrates our collective stories of resistance

PlatteForum will be hosting an opening reception for Kaylee and the ArtLab interns on Friday, April 25 from 6-8pm. Her exhibition will run from April 25 to May 21. Her “Artist Conversations” talk will be held on Friday, May 9 from 6:30-8pm at our Annex Gallery.

You can see more of Kaylee’s work on her website here, and follow her on social media at @nokaylee.

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