KELLY A. MUELLER

Originally from Chicago, Kelly A. Mueller teaches art at Lusher Charter High School and lives in Mid-City, New Orleans. Often large and textural, her paintings and drawings center on the tension between natural forces and systems, and the human tendency to subvert these systems.  She received her MFA from Northern Illinois University and is currently a member of The Front Gallery in New Orleans, and Baton Rouge Gallery, LA. She attends artist residencies whenever possible outside of her teaching, including such places as Hambidge, GA; Stone House, CA; Philadelphia Art Hotel, Dorland Mountain Art Colony, and a research trip to the Amazon Rainforest as a Surdna Fellow. Hiking, camping, canoeing, fishing, and being with her favorite people bring her great joy..

Kelly’s current studio work concentrates primarily on the tenuous space between natural law and the high-order organization (and accompanying habits) of human existence. Pulling from systems and behaviors found in nature, her painted works orchestrate narrative collages with the assistance of a digital projector, allowing bits of “projected chatter”: email snippets, articles, podcast headlines, to intermingle with her drawing. These projected images rise and fall in woven layers of visual and physical texture, acting as a form of hand-painted printmaking, speaking both to the artist’s choice and to the higher-order distraction we’ve created in an imagined environment we’ve separated from the natural world. She traps text, imagery, instructional manuals, and maps, found patterns and momentary realizations in layers of acrylic and charcoal. As Mueller explains, "I enjoy getting lost in the maze of light and shadow, sometimes giving myself over to the ease of written directions, at other times allowing myself the absorption of pulling out and fretting over a singular form or object, working over it with line and color until it exists perfectly, individually, lost among the masses."

Artist Member since 2011

Master of Fine Arts in 2004 from Northern Illinois University

Master of Art degree from Governors State University (University Park, Ill.)

current works

previous works