Klea McKenna

Teaches at Penumbra Foundation

Klea McKenna is a visual artist whose work urges light-sensitive materials to record the world in unexpected ways. Her “photographic reliefs” subvert photography’s reliance on sight by making photographic images rendered through touch, pressure and texture. In her work, broken patterns from the landscape and from cultural artifacts become allegories for human emotional experience and explorations of historical traces. Her photograms are held in the collections of the SFMOMA, LACMA, Santa Barbara Museum of Art, The Mead Museum of Art, Peabody-Essex Museum, Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art and the US Embassy Collection. Klea is represented by Euqinom Gallery in San Francisco and Gitterman Gallery in New York. In addition to her own art practice, she was co-founder and photographer at IN THE MAKEan online arts journal that published studio visits and interviews with over 120 West Coast artists from 2011 to 2015. Klea lives in San Francisco with her husband and their young children.