Katelyn Kopenhaver

Lives and works in Miami, FL, USA

Artist statement

Katelyn Kopenhaver (b. 1992) is an interdisciplinary artist whose work moves between public intervention, performance, text, and lens-based practices. Through familiar materials—QR codes, smiles, money, institutional formats, and her own body—she examines the mechanisms through which power circulates and behavior is shaped. As someone who has learned that what is on the surface is rarely the whole story, Kopenhaver makes work from within the conditions she critiques, looking at omitted information, patterns embedded in media language, and the structures that shape what is seen and what is withheld. Her work considers perception as conditional: what we think we see or know hardens into belief through repetition, circulation, and directed attention. She constructs situations that feel ordinary long enough for participation to become collision, shifting the viewer from passive observer to active participant. Rather than telling viewers what to think, the work examines how they think and why, often leaving them with a more immediate question: Should I intervene? Kopenhaver received her BFA in Photography from the School of Visual Arts in 2016 and is based in Miami, Florida, where she is a studio resident at Bakehouse Art Complex. She has received the NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowship (2021) and the Miami Individual Artists Grant (2024). Her work has been featured in The New York Times, New York Magazine, The Brooklyn Rail, and Der Greif Issue 18, curated by Hank Willis Thomas....

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