Lenhardt Lecture: Caroline Kent

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Join the spring 2026 Dawn and David Lenhardt Lecture featuring Chicago-based visual artist Caroline Kent. Kent, an associate professor in the Art, Theory, and Practice department at Northwestern University, was born in Sterling, Illinois in 1975, earning a Bachelor’s of Arts from Illinois State University and a Master of Fine Arts from the University of Minnesota. From 2000 to 2002, she lived in Alba Iulia, Romania, as a Peace Corps volunteer. Kent’s work explores the limits of language and the process of translation through an expanded painting practice. Developed through an open-ended archive of improvisational works on paper, her paintings built from this context take multiple forms, including drawings, sculpture, and performance. She labors to expand the discourse of modernist abstraction by questioning how language operates in unknown and ever-evolving conditions. Her work moves from surface and frame to environment and architecture through acts of translation from one medium to the next. A 2025 USA Fellow and recipient of the Aspen Arts Prize for innovation in painting, Kent has received grants from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, The McKnight Foundation, and Jerome Foundation. Additionally, she was a 2020 Artadia Chicago Awardee and a 2021 Joyce Alexander Wein Prize recipient from the Studio Museum in Harlem. Her recent exhibitions include La Trienal at El Museo del Barrio, New York City and Ancestral at the Museum of Brazilian Art (M.A.B.), São Paulo, Brazil. Kent has showcased her work at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, MoMA, MCA Chicago, the New Orleans Museum of Art, The Art Institute of Chicago, Hill Art Foundation, BAMPFA, the Queens Museum, and the Walker Art Center. $5.

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