contact: katherine.e.cavanaugh@gmail.com

Instagram: @sketchbook_banshee

I’ve been living and working on the south side of Chicago for eight years now (in Englewood and currently, South Shore). When I’m not painting, drawing, or printmaking, I work as a bus operator for the Chicago Transit Authority and put as much time as I can into political and community work, primarily with the anti-imperialist formation Behind Enemy Lines and the Englewood-based peacemaking organization Mothers Against Senseless Killings.

I grew up in the small, rural college town of Oberlin, OH, and graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2015.  I’ve worked as a sculptor’s assistant, mail clerk, domestic violence hotline advocate, tarot reader, office temp, personal assistant, art teacher, artistic director, muralist, and, most particularly, as a home health aide/elder caregiver, specially for dementia and Alzheimer’s patients. This all influences the kind of art I make; my family, my faith, and my life as chronically ill woman also make appearances. I'm a christian, and I use painting partially as a way to struggle with and question religious faith. Liberation theology is where it's at.

I want to spend my life as as artist making work about, for, and in collaboration with the proletariat. The art of the everyday, from quilting to graffiti, is the only art with a pulse, and though I fell in love with easel painting and drawing, and went and got an elite, formal art education, I'm working toward being part of that tradition. I want to have an artistic practice that is truly useful to silenced, marginalized, exploited, and oppressed people, because we deserve visual art that means something to us, that can help us mourn and celebrate, provoke struggle and critical thought, and inspire us to action.

All art is political, passively or actively, so I operate on the strength of my faith in a lack of barriers between studio work and real life as I develop into a better artist and a more effective revolutionary. I think that exposing injustice is an important aspect of protest art, and when I was in school it seemed like the most useful thing I could do with my work was expose and validate pain and struggle. Now that I’ve been “out in the world” as a worker and organizer and not simply a student and observer, I feel as though my body of work has an overall lack of fierceness or optimism, and I hope that my most recent work is starting to reflect the revolutionary optimism that I find in our connections to each other, and the fighting spirit that I love so much in the people of the south side.

To learn more about anti-imperialism and Behind Enemy Lines: https://behind-enemy-lines.org/

updated August 2023

Press:

On murals painted inside University Church in 2019: https://southsideweekly.com/finding-sanctuary-sanctuary-cafe/

As a caregiver: https://renewalmemory.org/blog/care-partner-of-the-month-katherine-cavanaugh