Katherine Kenal

Katherine Kenal is a contemporary American mokuhanga (Japanese water-based woodblock) printmaker and workshop instructor whose activity is documented principally through the community-printmaking-studio network of the United States Mountain West. Birth and death dates have not been published, and no formal art-school biography appears in the public record, which places her among the cohort of post-2010 North American practitioners whose careers run principally through open-access community print studios rather than commercial gallery representation.

Her best-documented affiliation is with Saltgrass Printmakers, the Salt Lake City non-profit, open-access printmaking studio established around 2004 by Stefanie Dykes and Sandy Brunvand to provide affordable studio access and instruction in relief, intaglio, and other printmaking techniques — including Japanese woodblock — to Utah-area artists. Kenal has taught multi-day mokuhanga workshops at Saltgrass that introduce participants to the traditional method: water-based pigments, kentō (kento) registration, and hand-printing with a baren onto washi, covering both single-block and multi-block colour separation together with the carving and printing tools and techniques of the medium.

Within the wider context, she belongs to the same generation of North American mokuhanga practitioners — alongside artists associated with studios such as 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, at a distance from the coastal 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, with a documentary footprint concentrated in studio and workshop material rather than in formal museum or institutional archives.