Biography
Katherine Kenal is a contemporary American mokuhanga printmaker and workshop instructor whose work has been documented principally through the regional printmaking-studio network of the United States Mountain West and through her teaching activity at non-profit print studios. Birth and death dates have not been published, no formal art-school biography is available in the public record, and her practice has not been written about in the standard mokuhanga monograph literature, which places her among the substantial cohort of post-2010 North American practitioners whose careers are conducted principally through community-printmaking studios and the international IMC exhibition circuit rather than through commercial gallery representation. Her best-documented teaching post is at Saltgrass Printmakers, the Salt Lake City non-profit open-access printmaking studio founded in 2004 by Stefanie Dykes, Sandy Brunvand, and Justin Diggle to provide affordable studio access and instruction in lithography, intaglio, relief, and Japanese woodblock to Utah-area artists. Kenal has run multi-day mokuhanga workshops at Saltgrass that introduce participants to the full traditional method — water-based pigments brushed onto the block with a maru-bake, kentō (kento) registration, hand-printing with a baren onto kozo or other washi, and both single-block and multi-block colour separation — and the curriculum has covered hanga-tō (cutting knife) and aisuki (clearing chisel) handling as well as the structural choices involved in moving from a single-block edition to a multi-block colour print. Beyond Saltgrass, she has been a participating artist in the Saltgrass Printmakers exhibition programme and is one of several mokuhanga teachers in the Utah print community whose practice has connected the Mountain West to the wider IMC training network. Her work has been included in the juried exhibitions associated with the 2024 International Mokuhanga Conference in Echizen, Fukui Prefecture, the principal Japanese centre for washi production, which constitutes her highest-profile presentation in the dedicated mokuhanga circuit. The published exhibition record is otherwise thin, and museum collections holding her work have not been documented. Within the regional context, she belongs to the same generation of American mokuhanga practitioners — among them artists associated with Constellation Studio in Lincoln, Nebraska and the Mokuhanga Project Space in Walla Walla, Washington — who have built the technical infrastructure for the medium in the interior United States, working at a comparable level of seriousness to coastal practitioners but at a distance from the New York and Los Angeles gallery system. The conservative reading of her career is that of a working teacher-practitioner whose primary contribution to the contemporary mokuhanga record is pedagogical and community-driven, and whose documentary footprint is concentrated in studio-newsletter and workshop-listing material rather than in formal museum or auction-house archives.
Key Facts
- Nationality
- 🇨🇦Canada
- Movement
- Contemporary Mokuhanga
- Works Indexed
- 13
Frequently Asked Questions
Katherine Kenal is a contemporary American mokuhanga printmaker and workshop instructor whose work has been documented principally through the regional printmaking-studio network of the United States Mountain West and through her teaching activity at non-profit print studios. Birth and death dates have not been published, no formal art-school biography is available in the public record, and her practice has not been written about in the standard mokuhanga monograph literature, which places her among the substantial cohort of post-2010 North American practitioners whose careers are conducted principally through community-printmaking studios and the international IMC exhibition circuit rather than through commercial gallery representation. Her best-documented teaching post is at Saltgrass Printmakers, the Salt Lake City non-profit open-access printmaking studio founded in 2004 by Stefanie Dykes, Sandy Brunvand, and Justin Diggle to provide affordable studio access and instruction in lithography, intaglio, relief, and Japanese woodblock to Utah-area artists. Kenal has run multi-day mokuhanga workshops at Saltgrass that introduce participants to the full traditional method — water-based pigments brushed onto the block with a maru-bake, kentō (kento) registration, hand-printing with a baren onto kozo or other washi, and both single-block and multi-block colour separation — and the curriculum has covered hanga-tō (cutting knife) and aisuki (clearing chisel) handling as well as the structural choices involved in moving from a single-block edition to a multi-block colour print. Beyond Saltgrass, she has been a participating artist in the Saltgrass Printmakers exhibition programme and is one of several mokuhanga teachers in the Utah print community whose practice has connected the Mountain West to the wider IMC training network. Her work has been included in the juried exhibitions associated with the 2024 International Mokuhanga Conference in Echizen, Fukui Prefecture, the principal Japanese centre for washi production, which constitutes her highest-profile presentation in the dedicated mokuhanga circuit. The published exhibition record is otherwise thin, and museum collections holding her work have not been documented. Within the regional context, she belongs to the same generation of American mokuhanga practitioners — among them artists associated with Constellation Studio in Lincoln, Nebraska and the Mokuhanga Project Space in Walla Walla, Washington — who have built the technical infrastructure for the medium in the interior United States, working at a comparable level of seriousness to coastal practitioners but at a distance from the New York and Los Angeles gallery system. The conservative reading of her career is that of a working teacher-practitioner whose primary contribution to the contemporary mokuhanga record is pedagogical and community-driven, and whose documentary footprint is concentrated in studio-newsletter and workshop-listing material rather than in formal museum or auction-house archives.
Katherine Kenal's work was shaped by the Contemporary Mokuhanga tradition in Japanese woodblock printmaking. Contemporary Mokuhanga: Contemporary mokuhanga (literally "wood-block print") encompasses artists working from approximately 1970 to the present who continue or reinvent traditional Japanese woodblock printing techniques.
Katherine Kenal is a contemporary printmaker working in the mokuhanga (Japanese woodblock) tradition. Their work contributes to the living tradition of Japanese woodblock printing. Prices for contemporary mokuhanga prints range from $100 for smaller works to $1,500 for major compositions. Most prints sell in the $180–$600 range. The global mokuhanga community has been growing, with increasing exhibition opportunities and collector interest. Contemporary mokuhanga represents an affordable entry point for collectors.
