Mallory Kimmel

Kimmel is a Washington-D.C.-based artist, who makes conceptual furniture to address exclusionary design practices. She focuses on disrupting loopholes used to deny human rights. Placing the focus on object-centric forms of possession, exclusion, objectification, and consumption helps to unravel the exploitation of objects to address the same forms of abuse applied to people. Kimmel believes if you liberate objects, you liberate people. Kimmel looks to objects and people as co-facilitators to democratize comfort-based privilege. Shifting hierarchical presentations in space to communal-based comfort will reshape public institutions in both form and practice. The use of sculpture, performance, critical writing and gathering as practice are employed to subvert capitalism and promote rest and community development. Formally trained in the arts, Kimmel received her MFA in fine art from California College of the Arts and degrees in studio art and ecology from Susquehanna University. She teaches as an adjunct professor at the Corcoran School of Art and Design at George Washington University, George Mason University, The University of Maryland, Community College of Baltimore County (CCBC) and Prince George’s Community College.

She manages the permanent art collection at CCBC; and has co-founded the Black X Collective, a grassroots organization dedicated to supporting Black filmmakers and Black musicians. Kimmel’s work has been published by e-flux, The George Washington University Museum and Textile Museum, and The Curator’s Salon. Kimmel’s work, Quiet Companion was acquired by CCBC as a permanent outdoor sculpture. Kimmel in 2023 was selected as the Jennie Lea Knight Fellow at the Studio Gallery in D.C. (2023-2025). In 2020 she completed the artist residency at the Social Studies Residency in Northern California and in 2018, she was selected as the Curatorial Fellow at Aggregate Space Gallery in Oakland. In 2017 Kimmel participated in an artist in residency in the Arctic Circle funded by the National Science Foundation and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration aboard a scientific research icebreaker ship USCG Healy.

Degrees:

• MFA, California College of the Arts
• Degrees in Studio Art and Ecology, Susquehanna University