A woman with long brown hair, wearing glasses, a houndstooth blazer, white shirt, and black pants, sitting indoors next to a wall with artwork and antiquities, looks to the left.

ARTIST STATEMENT

Through painting, sculpture, installation, and performance, I explore human creation and survival across time — mining global mythologies and art history for objects that function as fragmentary vessels of collective identity. Surviving wars, neglect, iconoclasm, and climate: from these echoes, our portrait emerges.

My ocean-based upbringing and background in art conservation shape a studio that is part wistful shrine, part R&D lab. I approach canvas first by flooding it with paint — a loose, atmospheric process that sets a vast ground before I introduce highly detailed, fragmented art-historical objects. I tether paintings to automated pulleys that respond to live environmental data; sculptures are video-mapped with projections of paradise; other works are installed in wavering landscapes — swamps, oceans, estuaries — to provoke conversations about the adaptations survival demands.

These works serve as a cautionary mirror. In examining the baggage of the past — what we've made, and how it has made us — I believe we must be nimble voyagers: shedding beliefs that no longer serve us, while holding fast to those whose anchorage faces both backwards and forwards in time.

BIOGRAPHY

Noël Kassewitz (b.1990, Miami) is a contemporary artist and third-generation Floridian based in Washington, D.C. After receiving her BFA from the University of Florida, she worked with the Rubell Museum and later, living abroad, completed an artist residency in Carrara, Italy with marble master sculptor Boutros Romhein. In addition to her studio practice, she currently works in sculpture conservation at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. 

Kassewitz has given an artist talk at the Smithsonian Hirshhorn Museum, is a five-time recipient of the DC Commission of the Arts and Humanities’ Visual Artist Fellowship Grant, and was recently named an inaugural Environmental Justice ‘Artivist’ Fellow with Social Arts & Culture + Aspen Institute (2024). She has been an artist-in-residence at the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Art Center on Governors Island (summer 2022) and at Vermont Studio Center through the VSC/Pollock-Krasner Foundation Fellowship (autumn 2022).

Her work is held in various private collections as well the public art collections of the District of Columbia, the University of Maryland, and the University of Florida and the corporate collections of MindTree and Outerknown.