Kate Howe, M.A.
Artist-in-Residence, Research Group Ethico-Aesthetics of the Visual
Kate Howe is an American artist, writer, and practice-led PhD researcher working across painting, installation, performance, and critical writing who holds MAs in Painting from the Royal College of Art and in Creative Writing from Kingston University, London. Their work explores how sexual and gendered violence is aestheticised, softened, and socialised through art history, myth, beauty, and the museum. Rooted in painting and extending into environments made from waxed kraft paper, light, sutured linen, and repair, Howe’s practice examines how bodies and knowledge are framed, covered, disciplined, and made visible. Their doctoral research is at the University of Leeds, and they are a 2026 fellow at the KHI with Dr Hana Gründler’s research group, “Ethico-Aesthetics of the Visual”. Howe is Founding Director and Artist in Residence at RuptureXIBIT, an artist-run residency in South West London. They have shown recently at PiSoundworks, London, Aspen Art Museum, US, and Hastings Contemporary, GB.
- Practice-led research
- Feminist theory
- Museology and institutional critique
- Civic collections and cultural inheritance
- Gendered violence and representation
- Socialisation of violence
- Gender obedience and bodily discipline
- Bodily sovereignty
- Aesthetics, beauty, taste, and admiration
- Renaissance visual culture and afterlives
- Botticelli and the politics of covering
- Reception aesthetics and viewer training
- Curatorial framing, wall text, and paratext
- Epistemic violence and women’s knowledge
- Archives, collections, and fugitive knowledge
- Public art and site-responsive practice
- Painting, installation, performance, and opera
- Repair, fragility, and material memory