Katy Kidd was raised in an art-collecting family in the seventies and eighties in Denver, where she studied art in the public schools, at the University of Denver’s Youth Art Program and at the Art Students League of Denver. In 1995 she graduated with a BA from Evergreen State College and that summer studied at Anderson Ranch Arts Center. Since the mid-nineties, Kidd has studied fine-art restoration with Andolsek Restoration and prehistoric pottery restoration with Schenck Southwest. In 2019 she was awarded a long-awaited MFA from the Double Standard Institute of the Arts under the instruction of artist Billy Schenck.

 

A critic has said of Katy Kidd’s work that it juxtaposes “a certain deliberate flatness reminiscent of Andy Warhol’s Brillo Boxes, which play with two- and three-dimensional allusions in Pop Art, with a street-art sensibility as direct as the “Smack” and “Pow!” graphics in a comic book. In Kidd’s paintings, clashing themes of the oppression of women, especially vis a vis religious dogma, and the institutionalized racism and classicism inherent to 21st-century global capitalism, point to the hypocrisy behind cultural systems that tout such ideals as kindness and compassion.” Kidd’s content is both tongue in cheek and deadly serious. 

 

Kidd’s work is in private collections around the US, as well as the Western Washington Cancer Treatment Center and the Lama Foundation. In addition to this, her street art has been in the Harwood Art Museum. Her paintings have been shown in California, Washington, New Mexico, Colorado, Wisconsin, Oregon, and Madrid, Spain. Her murals and street art have been exhibited in Kenya, Jamaica, Spain and multiple states in the US.

 

She lives and works in the diverse and historic Five Points neighborhood in downtown Denver, Colorado.