"Homehouse" Series: One to Four, 2024 Mixed media monotypes The "Homehouse" series consists of four mixed media monotypes. It explores the interplay between home as a personal and collective emotional space and house as a physical structure. The combined term, Homehouse, reflects this fused blending. Each work examines what makes a space both a home and a house, as well as a rich repository of experience, growth, and shared history. Employing broad, vibrant areas of intense, energetic color combined with chine collé to keenly represent studies, interests, and travels, the monotypes mark both personal milestones and the collective evolution of the family. Delicately reflecting themes of change and impermanence, the unfinished structures in the Homehouse monotype series also suggest loss, transformation, and the passage of time. Overall, the layered contrasts in the works aim to create a complex portrayal of family life and to reflect both the joyful and bittersweet experience as the youngest family member prepares to step into the future outside of the spaces and daily evolution of "Homehouse." "View from the Grand Canal": One and Three, 2025 Mixed media monotypes These two mixed media monotypes, from a variable series of three, explore the intensity of change in the light and color on the Grand Canal in Venice, Italy, just before and after a storm.
Kathleen Keys has taught in and coordinated the BFA Art Education program at Boise State University since 2005. Beyond her faculty role, Kathleen has also served in many academic leadership capacities at Boise State.
Turning her attention in 2022 from years of written and curatorial art education research back to art making, Kathleen has recently studied printmaking at intensive residency programs in Guanajuato City, Guanajuato, Mexico, and in both Florence and Venice, Italy. She exhibited in the 2025 Boise State Biannual Faculty Exhibition and began to maintain an art studio space beginning in December 2025. Her current studio practice primarily consists of mixed media printmaking and painting. She holds a BFA in painting from the University of Kentucky and both an MA in arts policy administration and a PhD in art education from The Ohio State University.
Kathleen completed a decade of prior service with the Boise Art Museum’s Board of Trustees and rejoined the board in 2023. She will finish a term as trustee president in May 2026.
