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Courtney Kessel is a mother, artist, scholar, and academic living and working in Athens, Ohio. Kessel exhibits her work nationally and internationally including the China Art Museum, Shanghai, New Maternalisms, at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Santiago Chile and New Maternalisms: Redux at the University of Alberta, Canada, FAMILY MATTERS: Living and Representing Today’s Family, Centre for Contemporary Culture Strozzina, Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi, Florence, Italy, the Tampa Museum of Art, and Exit Art, New York, New York. She has lectured on her work and research in both universities and museums from the Norton Museum of Art to Brigham Young University Art Museum.
Through sculpture, photography, performance, video, and sound, Courtney Kessel’s work strives to make visible the quiet, understated, and often unseen love and labor of motherhood. In the annual performance piece, In Balance With (2010-present), Kessel presents a version of the maternal which investigates collaboration with her (now 21-year-old) daughter, as a visible, changeable aspect of mothering. Other projects of which reflect over a decade of research into the subjective maternal include: Mother Lode, Symphony of the Domestic, Cut From the Same, Fabric of Life and the video Sharing Space.
Kessel is the Director of Experiential Curriculum Integration and an instructor in the School of Art + Design, both at Ohio University. Currently pursuing her PhD in Interdisciplinary Arts, she earned her MFA in Sculpture & Expanded Practices and graduate certificate in Women’s Gender & Sexuality Studies from Ohio University and holds a BFA in Sculpture from Tyler School of Art.