Kevin Brophy

Statement on Scholarly or Artistic Work

Kevin Brophy is a visual artist with a design-based practice, whose work engages with dialogical power structures—rhetorical, visual, and social–with a focus on everyday language and non-dominant narratives. She creates visual and textual spaces, objects, and performances that evaluate how bodies are situated within asymmetrical systems. She uses narrative and prefigurative politics to break with normative structures while engaging with the aesthetics of mass appeal. With a background in creative writing and interventionist performance, Brophy’s work is hybridized and intertextual. Broadly, her artistic practice includes text, new media, performance, installation, sculpture, and speculative design facilitated and informed by social technologies.

Her current series, Absence Monuments, uses everyday materials and language to relate to the human body at an inviting scale rather than an imposing one. It conflates physical information—natural and made environment—with socially constructed imperatives: theory, culture, and history. These material installations elaborate on how the narrative political site-of-self transects with digital performativity, interactivity and the Internet-of-Things. Her work seeks to locate alternate stories and create relics of a future that counters cultural homogeneity. She is currently working on the script and graphics for an autotheory film spanning 2015-2025 tentatively titled, A History of Embodiment in the Age of AI, or HOW TO UPLOAD YOUR GIRLFRIND.

Throughout her artistic career, collaboration has been both productive and essential, having partnered in several intersectional feminist collectives over the years. These professional relationships do not preclude friendship; and friendship and mutual care do not preclude intellectual and creative exchange—sometimes things that could be called ~work. Brophy is one half of the collaborative duo Housewives of the Queer Hearth with Rosa Nussbaum. This intermedia work scrutinizes gender data gaps and other inequities. Often through large-scale, immersive installations, HotQH reinterprets and aggrandizes the work of historical utopian feminist architects and city-planners. Their individual artworks range from animated toile wallpaper to an elongated chaise lounge. While the project is pointedly portrayed through a lens coded by humor, queer joy, friendship, and play, the research is grounded in analyzing and critiquing the hierarchical power implicated in architecture and city planning. For all its visual camp, the project engages with these forms conceptually and materially to explicate systemic neglect built on the suppression of bodies through exclusion, regulation, and data gaps drawing inspiration from texts and lectures from Caroline Criado Perez, Sarah Ahmed, Aaron Betsky, Donna Haraway and Silvia Federici to name a few.

Educational Background

Research, Scholarly, Creative Work

Brophy has participated in residencies across the US and Europe, including Vermont Studio Center (Johnson VT), World of Co (Sofia, BG), Kala Art Institute (Berkeley, CA), Villa Barr Art Park (Novi, MI), Laboratory (Spokane, WA), and Elsewhere Museum (Greensboro, NC). Her work has been exhibited in museums, art centers, galleries, and alternative spaces including Edgar Heap of Birds Family Gallery (Lawrence, KS), Ringling Museum of Art (Sarasota, FL), Museum of Contemporary Art (Cleveland, OH), Tempus Projects and Quaid Gallery (Tampa, FL), Museum of Human Achievement (Austin, TX), Carnegie Museum of Art and Miller Institute of Contemporary Art (Pittsburgh, PA) to name a few. Some of her interventionist performances have taken place at PS1 (New York, NY), PAMM (Miami, FL), Frontier Airlines (Chicago, IL), and Tampa International Mall (Tampa, FL). Brophy has curated 7 exhibitions in the past 4 years. She has written several self-published zines, and published works including short stories, poems, and exhibition catalog essays for other artists. Her work has been written about in the publications Art in the Public Sphere, a/b Studies Taylor & Francis, and Vice Magazine. Brophy’s collaborative video game with Hannah Epstein, Newest Art Game: *hot*girls*only* has been exhibited at Arsenal Contemporary online (Montreal, Quebec CA), University of California Irvine for Games@Play, and Polytechnic Institute Worchester for Different Games Conference. Later this fall, she will be a digital resident at FLUSSLAB platform (Berlin/Buenos Aires).

Brophy’s ongoing collaborative work with Rosa Nussbaum, HotQH, has had solo exhibitions across the US, including McLanahan & Sheetz Galleries, Altoona, PA, Edgar Heap of Birds Family Gallery, Lawrence, KS, and Charlotte Street Foundation, Kansas City, MO. Their other collaborative work is featured in Elsewhere Museum’s permanent collection, was exhibited at Women and Their Work in Austin, TX and Brophy’s curation of Nussbaum’s work exhibited at ACC Gallery Weimar, Germany. Most recently, they worked at a small scale by re-designing the interior of a 1990’s Polly Pocket toy for Melbourne Design Week 2025 in Victoria, Australia—it came complete with a special edition sticker graphics pack!

Professional Experience

Awards and Honors

Speaking Engagements