Location: Richmond, CA
Medium: Sculpture, tapestry, drawing
Website: emkettner.com
Em Kettner was born in 1988 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and lives and works in Richmond, California. They received a BFA from the University of the Arts, Philadelphia in 2011 and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2014. Kettner has a rare form of muscular dystrophy, and their practice is inseparable from a life lived in a disabled body — one that they describe not as a limitation but as a source of expansive creative and political thinking about interdependence, care, and the permeability of bodily boundaries.
Their work is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the DePaul Art Museum; and the Joan Flasch Artists’ Book Collection, both in Chicago. They are represented by François Ghebaly in New York and Los Angeles and Rebecca Camacho Presents in San Francisco. Their work has been reviewed in the Paris Review, Artforum, Art in America, and Cultured Magazine, and has been exhibited at the MFA Boston, Pipeline London, Pangée Montreal, and Frieze House Seoul.
Kettner makes intricately crafted porcelain sculptures, handwoven tapestries, glazed ceramic tile drawings, and artist books, typically at a small, intimate scale — each figure roughly the size of an outstretched hand. The works portray disabled bodies in humorous, erotic, and tender postures, subverting conventions that associate disability with tragedy, passivity, or inspiration. Figures merge into each other, their limbs interchangeable with furniture legs, canes, and bed frames, proposing a model of embodied interdependence rather than individual wholeness. Ceramic gives form to textile, and thread binds broken porcelain — the materials themselves enact the mutual support Kettner writes and speaks about extensively. Their practice also extends to writing, zine-making, and an ongoing engagement with the disability arts community at NIAD Art Center in Richmond.
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