Kimberly Brooks integrates figuration and abstraction to explore a variety of subjects dealing with history, memory and identity. Exhibitions include Mom's Friends, Technicolor Summer, The Stylist Project, I Notice People Disappear, Brazen and most recently Fever Dreams at Mt San Antonio College (2018). Brooks paintings have been showcased in numerous juried exhibitions with artist curators including Chris Burden, Mira Schor and Museum curators from the Whitney Museum of American Art, The Museum of Modern Art, California Institute of the Arts, Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Her work is the featured subject of Brazen, A Collection of Paintings and Poetry by Griffith Moon. Her work has received international press and she was recently a featured artist for the National Endowment for the Arts. Also an educator, Brooks teaches workshops around the country including at Otis School of Art and Design in Los Angeles and The Anderson Ranch Art Center in Colorado. She is the recipient of the Franklyn Liegel Award for Teaching excellence. She was born in New York City, raised in Mill Valley and works and lives in Los Angeles. Michael Wilson is a writer and curator based in New York. His writings have appeared in a wide variety of publications including Art Monthly, Artforum, Contemporary, Modern Painters, Time Out New York, Village Voice, and The Wire. Wilson has held editorial posts at Art in America, Artforum, Contemporary, and Untitled, and has contributed to exhibition catalogues published by Art in General, La Biennale di Venezia, Lisson Gallery, Marlborough Gallery, Matthew Marks Gall. Shana Nys Dambrot is an art critic, curator, and author based in Downtown LA. She is the Arts Editor for the LA Weekly, and a contributor to Whitehot Magazine, KCET's Artbound, Flaunt, Fabrik, Art and Cake, Artillery, Palm Springs Life, Riot Material, West Hollywood Lifestyle, Jenkem, and Porter & Sail. She studied Art History at Vassar College, writes essays for books and catalogs, curates and juries a few exhibitions each year. SND is a dedicated Instagram photographer and author of experimental short fiction, and speaks at galleries, schools, and cultural institutions nationally. She is a member of ArtTable and the LA Press Club, and sits on the Boards of Art Share-LA and the Venice Institute of Contemporary Art, the Advisory Council of Building Bridges Art Exchange, and the Brain Trust of Some Serious Business.
In the art of Kimberly Brooks, reality dances, tantalizingly, just out of reach. The interiors and landscapes of her paintings are lush, seductive, but impossible to occupy; while stocked with familiar aesthetic cues, they feel hallucinatory, displaced not only from the here and now but even from the historical circumstances they mimic. - Michael Wilson ...Color and the poetry of a brushstroke command the conversation, the image becomes both a vestigial memory of a place and an armature for Brooks to discover an expression contained in the pure emotional power of painting. Gary Brewer, Art & Cake Imagining the distant past as described in history books and museums is clearly a key inspiration for Brooks' hazily painted portrayals of venerable settings. Blank paintings within paintings appear to have mysteriously vanished from ornate frames. Adorning faintly painted museum walls, gilt-framed indistinct sub-pictures sport nondescript subjects. Annabel Osberg, Artillery Magazine