Kristen Struebing-Beazley

Artist Statement

Kristen Struebing-Beazley’s work explores the enduring relationship between Eros and Thanatos—desire and mortality—as recurring themes in art across cultures and time. Working in printmaking, ceramics, and installation, she draws upon ancient imagery, ritual, memorialization, and the macabre.

Her ongoing series of nearly one hundred hand-built “specimen” lachrymal bowls, constructed on human calvarium forms, considers mourning and remembrance through objects that reference ancient funerary traditions. In her erotic linocut prints, she reinterprets imagery from ancient Greek drinking vessels associated with the all-male symposium, bringing together sexuality, ritual, pleasure, and mortality.

Struebing-Beazley’s formative years as an artist in New Orleans continue to influence her work, particularly its themes of masquerade, celebration, death, and transformation. Across her varied media, she embraces the tension between the sensual and the mortal, acknowledging death while celebrating the pleasures and mysteries of life.

Biography

Kristen Struebing-Beazley is a multidisciplinary artist working in printmaking, ceramics, installation, and performance. Born in Chicago and raised in Pittsburgh, she developed an early interest in art through Saturday art classes at the Carnegie Museum. Her practice has been shaped by an enduring interest in ancient cultures, memorialization, mythology, sexuality, mortality, and the relationship between Eros and Thanatos.

Struebing-Beazley earned degrees in sociology and history and later studio art and art history from the University of Maryland. Her varied early experiences included service as an American Red Cross Donut Dollie with the United States 8th Army in Korea and work as a Peace Corps volunteer in Brazil. She subsequently moved to New Orleans, where she established herself as a gallery artist and earned her MFA in Printmaking from Tulane University in 1982.

She taught printmaking at Tulane University for five years and worked at Errol Street Studio in London. In 1984, she became a founding member of The Vestiges Project, a long-running artist and writer collaboration with Jan Gilbert and Debra Howell. She also served on the Board of Directors of the Contemporary Arts Center in New Orleans and performed for ten years as a mezzo-soprano with the New Orleans Opera Chorus.

Now based in Boston, Struebing-Beazley continues to work from her Victorian schoolhouse studio. She has participated in public, collaborative, and internationally funded projects, exhibited with the Boston Printmakers, and traveled with printmaking exhibitions to Mexico and Iceland. Her international exhibitions have extended to Spain, Portugal, France, and England.

Her work has also developed through ceramic residencies at Haystack, Anderson Ranch, and the Watershed Center for the Ceramic Arts. She has collaborated with artist Vernita N’Cognita on several detritus-based projects and has contributed writing to publications including New Orleans Art Review, Art Dynamo, Arts Media Boston, and Helicon Nine: A Journal of Women’s Arts and Letters.