Biography
Kathleen Hargrave is a contemporary American printmaker and glass artist whose practice combines Japanese mokuhanga with etching, collagraph, and blown and kiln-formed glass, and whose career has been concentrated in the Pacific Northwest print and glass-art community. Birth and death dates have not been published, but her own biography records that she was born in California and lives east of Seattle in the Pacific Northwest, with her studio practice principally based in Redmond, Washington. Her formal training began with a B.A. in Fine Art and Art Education from the University of Oregon (1975), followed by post-graduate printmaking studies at the University of Washington in Seattle across 1984–87, and multiple sessions at the Pilchuck Glass School in Stanwood, Washington — the studio-glass school co-founded by Dale Chihuly in 1971. Her engagement with mokuhanga developed within the contemporary Pacific Northwest print community and was reinforced by her participation in the Fifth International Mokuhanga Conference (IMC2024) in Echizen City, Fukui Prefecture, Japan, where her work was included in the juried international exhibition at the Imadate Art Center. In 2024 she held a residency at the Mokuhanga Project Space in Walla Walla, Washington, and a further residency at Constellation Studio in Lincoln, Nebraska. She was named a recipient of the Mary and Gary Molyneaux Scholarship (2024–25) by Seattle Print Arts, the regional print organization, and her exhibition record spans from the late 1980s to the present, including glass and print exhibitions at venues such as the Bellevue Art Museum. She is a member of Seattle Print Arts, the Los Angeles Printmaking Society, the Glass Art Society, the American Craft Council, and the Society of American Graphic Artists (SAGA). The thematic register of her recent work is what she describes as forest bathing — drawn from the Japanese practice of shinrin-yoku, the contemplative immersion in forest environments codified as a public-health concept in Japan in the 1980s — and the prints in this strand pursue layered, gestural, brush-driven mokuhanga surfaces that read as an aerial or canopy register of forest space, frequently combined with etching plates in the same composition. Notable individual prints include Resilience (11 x 14 in., mokuhanga), Near the Gap (12 x 16 in., etching and mokuhanga), and Orbits and Velocity (16.5 x 21 in., mokuhanga). Her glass work is held in the collection of the Cleveland Museum of Art, and her recent printmaking has been shown through the Seattle Print Arts and Mokuhanga Project Space exhibition programmes.
Key Facts
- Nationality
- 🇺🇸United States
- Movement
- Contemporary Mokuhanga
- Works Indexed
- 3
Frequently Asked Questions
Kathleen Hargrave is a contemporary American printmaker and glass artist whose practice combines Japanese mokuhanga with etching, collagraph, and blown and kiln-formed glass, and whose career has been concentrated in the Pacific Northwest print and glass-art community. Birth and death dates have not been published, but her own biography records that she was born in California and lives east of Seattle in the Pacific Northwest, with her studio practice principally based in Redmond, Washington. Her formal training began with a B.A. in Fine Art and Art Education from the University of Oregon (1975), followed by post-graduate printmaking studies at the University of Washington in Seattle across 1984–87, and multiple sessions at the Pilchuck Glass School in Stanwood, Washington — the studio-glass school co-founded by Dale Chihuly in 1971. Her engagement with mokuhanga developed within the contemporary Pacific Northwest print community and was reinforced by her participation in the Fifth International Mokuhanga Conference (IMC2024) in Echizen City, Fukui Prefecture, Japan, where her work was included in the juried international exhibition at the Imadate Art Center. In 2024 she held a residency at the Mokuhanga Project Space in Walla Walla, Washington, and a further residency at Constellation Studio in Lincoln, Nebraska. She was named a recipient of the Mary and Gary Molyneaux Scholarship (2024–25) by Seattle Print Arts, the regional print organization, and her exhibition record spans from the late 1980s to the present, including glass and print exhibitions at venues such as the Bellevue Art Museum. She is a member of Seattle Print Arts, the Los Angeles Printmaking Society, the Glass Art Society, the American Craft Council, and the Society of American Graphic Artists (SAGA). The thematic register of her recent work is what she describes as forest bathing — drawn from the Japanese practice of shinrin-yoku, the contemplative immersion in forest environments codified as a public-health concept in Japan in the 1980s — and the prints in this strand pursue layered, gestural, brush-driven mokuhanga surfaces that read as an aerial or canopy register of forest space, frequently combined with etching plates in the same composition. Notable individual prints include Resilience (11 x 14 in., mokuhanga), Near the Gap (12 x 16 in., etching and mokuhanga), and Orbits and Velocity (16.5 x 21 in., mokuhanga). Her glass work is held in the collection of the Cleveland Museum of Art, and her recent printmaking has been shown through the Seattle Print Arts and Mokuhanga Project Space exhibition programmes.
Kathleen Hargrave'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.
