Kim Anno

The influence of abstraction and abstracting something remains prominent in Kim Anno’s practice, with resulting work that remains “open, playful, and engaged with a difficult ephemeral beauty.” Anno collaborates with other artists and musicians, integrating video, sculpture, sound, and interactivity in performative installations such as Jose Navarrete, Debby Kajiyama. The spectrum of Anno’s work ranges from evocative abstract physical paint, to a rearrangement of 19th century steel engravings lavishly painted on metal and wood. Her paintings imagine the landscape as a result of a changing climate. The photography and videos wrestle with adaptation in disaster, and occupy an arena of irony, empathy and loss. Anno looks at the heart of Western idealism in nature and tinkers with it. Her brushwork is both tender and adoring, and it is dystopic. Viewers are left with the blushing dilemma of desire and regret.

Anno is an environmental activist and is also passionately devoted to expanding the function of art in society. She recently founded a non-profit named Wild Projects with the mission statement "Wild Projects collaborates with communities world wide through fearless art, film, and performance productions to inspire resiliency in the face of adversity.” Anno intends to sponsor and incubate projects that agree with this mission statement in their work, and to be mutually supportive of artistic production in a variety of fields. 

Born in Los Angeles, Anno has had exhibitions and screenings at the 14th Annual New Media Festival, Seoul, Korea, Kala Art Institute,Berkeley, Goethe Institute in Johannesburg, the Durban Municipal Gallery, South Africa in the “Don’t Panic Exhibition”, Flux Projects, Atlanta, Marcia Wood Gallery in Atlanta, 6 channel video installation, Windows Project, Atlanta, Sky Dive Gallery, Houston, San Francisco Asian Art Museum, Patricia Sweetow Gallery in San Francisco, Seeline Gallery in Los Angeles, Patricia Correia Gallery, Santa Monica, Sue Scott Gallery, NY, Site Santa Fe Biennale: One Night Stand in New Mexico, the King’s Art Center, California Retrospective, the Varnosi Museum in Hungary, DC Dusseldorf International Expo (Germany), Pulse, Miami, and the Berkeley Art Museum, the Denison University Museum, and Noel Art Museum. Anno’s work was recently acquired by the Berkeley Art Museum, and the Crocker Art Museum. Recipient of theWallace Alexander Gerbode Foundation Purchase Award and the Eureka Foundation’s Fleishhaker Fellowship, Anno has been a professor at the California College of the Arts since 1996. She was recently awarded a fellowship by the Zellerbach Foundation and the Open Circle Foundation in 2012-13 as well as a Sustainable Arts residency at Kala Art Institute in support of her new interdisciplinary work. In Fall 2014 Anno was a recipient of a Berkeley Film Foundation Award and published her second artists’ book with the poet Anne Carson.