I make art because it is the one place I don’t feel trapped.

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My mind goes in every direction at once. Ideas contradict each other. I change course constantly. I wake up some days feeling held in place by my history, my anxiety, a world moving faster than I can process. So I shred the history. I build new worlds. I take up space. I make things. Because making is the one reliable way out of the feeling of being stuck.

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I am trying to find myself in the world we are living in right now. We live in a hyperworld — oversaturated, hypersensitive, moving faster than any of us can fully process. Art history is being made in real time by everyone with a phone and a voice. The hardest thing is to slow down, stay present, and remain yourself in a world that keeps trying to make you somebody else. That is what my art practice is. All of it.

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I’ve been saying “I do by myself” since I was a toddler. Every car I bought to get unstuck, every roommate situation I fled, every late-night hustle to keep my loft and my own hours — all of it in service of one stubborn, burning dream: to be free. To make things happen on my own terms. To not wait for anyone to tell me it was time. I stopped waiting for permission a long time ago. Not because the doors were closed. Because I couldn’t stand the waiting.

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The Work

My practice spans painting, drawing, photography, video, performance, installation, writing, and social practice. All of it is the same gesture — me trying to make sense of the world, and of my life within it.

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For over a decade I’ve been cutting things up. Paintings, photographs, 52 years of personal archives. The cutting started as compulsive response and became methodology — a way of processing what my body and mind have carried, and transforming it into something new. I create large-scale wall sculptures measuring exactly 5’3” x 26” — my exact body dimensions. Nothing fixed. Everything reconfigurable. Impermanence isn’t a problem to solve; it’s how identity actually works.

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Perceive Me is my decade-long collaborative social practice project in which I pose nude for 100+ figurative artists — painters, photographers, sculptors, drawers — inviting them to interpret my body through their own visual language. The same body. Over 100 completely different truths. It has been exhibited at Cal State LA, Museum of Art and History Lancaster, Coastline College, Studio Channel Islands, and Mesa College, and covered by the LA Times, Hyperallergic, Artillery, and Dazed Digital.

The Gracie Kendal Project began in 2006 when I created an avatar in Second Life — my alter ego, my laboratory, the braver voice on my shoulder. Over nearly a decade I built an entire life inside that virtual world: galleries, exhibitions, three Linden Endowment for the Arts residencies, performances, friendships. My MA thesis at Cal State Northridge — My Life as an Avatar — explored what happens when you put on a mask, what you find underneath it, and what you discover about yourself when you inhabit someone entirely different. The project continues. The archive — books, screenshots, 159 days of daily side-by-side photographs of me and my avatar — will be on view at the Brand Library, Glendale, September 2026.

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My Imaginary Wall makes visible the invisible barriers I’ve built inside my own mind — constructed from living with an eating disorder, anxiety, depression, and the fear of taking up space in a world that decided bodies like mine don’t belong. Thousands of colorful adhesive dots applied to windows and walls, transparent and penetrable, made of light and color rather than concrete. Built through community participation. Deconstructed the same way. Dot by dot.

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Kristine’s Sweet Shoppe of Liberation transforms 52 years of personal history — shredded documents, diary pages, painted spoons, love letters — into collectible “liberation blends” packaged in acrylic vitrines. The Fluxus tradition of everyday life as art, made deeply personal. Destruction as generative practice.

The Infrastructure

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I don’t just make art about community — I build the systems that allow artists to thrive. Because none of us should have to navigate this alone.

I founded Shoebox Arts in 2014 as a comprehensive support network offering mentorship, critique groups, professional development, and community for artists navigating an art world that wasn’t built for us. In 2016 I launched Art and Cake, a contemporary LA art magazine that has published 1,800+ articles amplifying voices and spaces the mainstream ignores. Call and Response, founded April 2020, is an international artist exchange network spanning 500+ artists across six continents and 20+ rounds of exchange.

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Money should flow through the art ecosystem, not accumulate. Generosity begets generosity. Support begets support. I learned this from Sharon Louden, from Lewis Hyde’s writing on the gift economy, from Robin Wall Kimmerer’s honorable harvest. I am tending an ecosystem. Not extracting from one.

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The Philosophy​

The invisible wall is real. The feeling of being trapped is real. My history has held me. My mind has held me. The culture has held me — in a body it decided was wrong, in a role it decided was too much, in a story it decided it would rather not tell. So I shred what holds me. I cut it up and transform it and send it back into the world as something else. Something lighter. Something mine.

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Every project is a small act of breaking free. The shredding. The avatar. The nude portraits. The selfies. The candy shop. The paintings cut into body-sized sculptures. All of it is me finding a way to move when my mind says I’m stuck. All of it is me practicing freedom in a world that makes freedom very difficult.

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And I do all of this publicly. Because I know I am not the only one who wakes up feeling trapped, feeling overwhelmed, feeling like the world is moving too fast and there is no room for who you actually are. Through Shoebox Arts, Art and Cake, Call and Response, through mentorship and writing and community building — I try to make room for other artists to find themselves too. To take up space. To stop waiting for permission. The art is how I survive. The community is how we all do.

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You don’t need permission. Make the work. Make it now. Your practice is valid in all its forms. Artists shouldn’t navigate the art world alone. The art world needs alternative systems — so we build them ourselves. Reciprocity over competition. Every time.

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The Biography

Kristine Schomaker is a multidisciplinary artist, curator, publisher, mentor, and community organizer based at the Brewery Artist Complex in Los Angeles. She earned her BA in Art History and MA in Studio Art from California State University, Northridge, where she studied under Betty Ann Brown and Samantha Fields.

Her work has been exhibited at UCLA, Cal State LA, Museum of Art and History Lancaster, Coastline College, Studio Channel Islands, Mesa College, San Diego Art Institute, Torrance Art Museum, 18th Street Art Center, and galleries throughout Southern California and beyond. It has been covered by the LA Times, Dazed Digital, Artillery Magazine, Hyperallergic, the San Diego Union-Tribune, HuffPost, and CBS News. She received the 2025 CCI CALI Catalyst Changemakers Grant from the Center for Cultural Innovation.

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She has served as President of the Brewery Artwalk Association and California State University Northridge Arts Alumni and has taught art history at Antelope Valley College and Pasadena City College. Her influences include Lynn Hershman Leeson, Cindy Sherman, Ana Mendieta, Hannah Wilke, Mary Kelly, Suzanne Lacy, Theaster Gates, Andrea Zittel, Lewis Hyde, Robin Wall Kimmerer, and Sharon Louden.

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This is my art. This is just me. Trying to make sense of it all.