Kennedy Yanko

Kennedy Yanko (St. Louis, 1988; lives and works in Brooklyn) is a visual artist who works mostly with scrap metal and paint latex. She trained at the San Francisco Art Institute. Her research focuses on the ambiguity of perception and the importance of abstraction as a means to knowledge.

Since the debut of her first sculptures ‘Elements and Skin’ in the group show curated by Derrick Adams Hidden in Plain Sight at the Jenkins Johnson Project Space, Brooklyn, NY, (2017), Yanko has exhibited regularly in galleries and at national and international art fairs.

Her recent shows include: Highly Worked, at the Denny Dimin Gallery in New York; Hannah at Kavi Gupta in Chicago and Before Words at the UICA in Grand Rapids, (2019). Contemporaneously with Because it’s in my blood, Yanko is presenting SALIENT QUEEN at the VIELMETTER LOS ANGELES gallery.

She exhibited in the group show Cry of Victory and Short Walks to Freedom as part of Hank Willis Thomas’s For Freedoms project (2018), and she was invited to participate in Parallels and Peripheries at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Detroit (2019).

Her works are found in the JP Morgan Chase Collection, and in the collections of Beth Rudin deWood and Helyn Goldenberg. In 2018 she was nominated ‘Artist of the week’ by the magazine Milk during Armory Week.