Kristen Mitchell

Kristen Mitchell is a Utah-based artist who documents naturally emergent compositions through reflective, diffractive, and collaborative practices. Committed to community-based art practice, she is founder and producer of Living Marks (an open source art project developed to facilitate creative inter-media collaboration), a member of the Revolution School art collective, and a participant in Virtual Care Lab. She served as chair of the Summit County Public Art Board, juror for the Utah Film Festival, and an active public art advocate. She has received multiple awards and grants, including Ogden City Arts and Nine Rails Creative District, and held residencies at Vermont Studio Center and the Utah Museum of Natural History.

Kristen’s work at the Taft Humanities Center will celebrate the spectacular celestial landscapes that can be seen clearly in the Centennial Valley’s well-preserved dark sky. Light pollution keeps distant light sources hidden in most areas of the world and the valley’s stunning views of the starscapes illuminate what we have lost or forgotten in just a few generations.

The Centennial Valley starscape “deep space plein air” drawings presents a unique point of view by including the night sky in our idea of what a wilderness landscape includes. Artwork of distant objects observed through the telescope follows a long tradition of recording the known world through drawing and creates an intimacy with distant light sources that enriches our sense of location in the cosmos.