Catherine Kernan

Catherine Kernan is an American printmaker and painter based in the Boston area whose practice operates at the boundary between woodcut and painting. She is co-founder and partner of Mixit Print Studio, a professional open-access printmaking workshop in Somerville, Massachusetts, established in 1987 and one of the most prominent independent print studios in New England.

Kernan completed an MFA at the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1981 and has been an exhibiting printmaker for more than four decades. She co-founded Mixit Print Studio with Jane Goldman in 1987 as a direct outgrowth of the Artist's Proof Studio model, and the partnership expanded in 2010 with the addition of Randy Garber. Mixit operates as a working studio for its three partners and as a teaching and editioning facility for the wider Boston print community.

Her studio practice is dedicated to large-format woodcut, drypoint, and monotype, all using non-toxic Akua Intaglio inks. The signature aspect of her practice is that she rarely prints directly from a block to paper — instead, she inks multiple large-scale woodblocks and offsets them onto polycarbonate plates, then transfers from the polycarbonate to paper. The combination of multi-block offset printing, viscosity rolling in different ink densities, and never inking the same way twice produces what she terms 'singular prints' — works that are technically prints but are unique impressions in the manner of monotypes. The result is a body of woodcut-monoprint hybrids on the scale of paintings.

The sustained organising principle of her work is a sequence of named series, each of which extends a single visual idea across dozens of large-format sheets. Her current and recent series — visible on her own catalogue site as the principal organising taxonomy — include Afterimages, Against the Grain, Arching the Stream, At the Whim of Currents, Breathing Space (2015, woodcut monoprint, 30 × 44 inches), Circling the Center, Curvature, Echo Location, Elegy, Lyric Fragments, Marking Time, Navigation, Overlay, Quotation, Soundings, Staccato, Surface to Surface, Threshold, Time and Again, and Tracings. The series titles foreground sound, currents, breathing, and the rhythms of attention as the conceptual framework for her abstract mark-making.

Kernan has held faculty positions at colleges, art institutes, and museums, has been an art instructor for over twenty-five years, and has taught printmaking workshops across the United States. She is represented by Soprafina Gallery in Boston and Jason McCoy Gallery in New York, and her work is held in numerous American institutional collections. She is also profiled in the Making Art Safely educational resource as one of the prominent Akua-ink-using studio practitioners in the United States.

Within contemporary American printmaking she is one of the leading practitioners of large-format woodcut as painting — a strand that links her practice with the work of Yvonne Jacquette, Jim Dine, and the broader West Coast tradition of monumental relief — and one of the most influential figures in the New England print community through her partnership in Mixit Print Studio and her decades of teaching.