Adrienne Kinsella
Adrienne Kinsella grew up surrounded by art on the Westside of Los Angeles, where the street murals and graffiti of Venice and Santa Monica became some of her earliest visual references. As a child, she would study these works from the backseat of the car, mentally cataloging images that left a lasting impression. Coming from a family of artists, she was immersed early in creative spaces. Her parents regularly took her and her sisters to Los Angeles museums, where they brought sketchbooks and drew from the paintings that resonated with them. These experiences fostered a deep love of museums and a lasting respect for art as a way of seeing and understanding the world.
Kinsella returned to graduate school later in life, earning her MFA in 2021. The experience was demanding but profoundly formative. Graduate study reinforced a sense of humility about learning and deepened her appreciation for critique and shared creative inquiry. Being surrounded by other artists shaped her practice and clarified her commitment not only to making art, but also to teaching. Since graduate school, she has taught at the university level, including at Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles. Teaching has become a vital extension of her practice, fueling her own work through continual engagement with students’ ideas, experimentation, and energy.
Themes of home and belonging run throughout Kinsella’s work. She often approaches these ideas through the experience of being “othered,” examining the pressures placed on women to conform to shifting social roles. More recently, her work has engaged questions of belonging through her connection to the Los Angeles landscape and her Native Tongva heritage. Because the Tongva tribe is not federally recognized, Kinsella frequently encounters disbelief about its continued presence. In response, she incorporates native plants as subtle motifs within her work. These indigenous botanicals function as quiet assertions of continuity, standing in for both memory and survival across generations.
Self-portraiture is another recurring element in her practice. This began during the isolation of the pandemic and has continued as a way of grounding herself within demanding personal and professional contexts. Placing her own figure, or more recently the silhouetted shapes of her hands, into drawings and paintings allows for vulnerability and honesty. These gestures operate as anchors within the work, creating points of connection between the artist and viewer, especially in moments of emotional ambiguity or quiet intensity.
Kinsella draws significant inspiration from her surroundings, particularly through weekly hikes in Griffith Park. As one of the few large green spaces in central Los Angeles, the park offers physical and emotional respite from the density of urban life. The sounds of birds, the rhythm of walking, and the presence of trees regularly find their way into her work. Her recent paintings reflect these experiences, depicting local botanicals and landscapes paired with silhouetted hands that contain star-filled skies. These skies act as portals between past and present, referencing ancestral knowledge, creativity, and continuity across time.
Her work seeks to offer connection rather than resolution. Early influences such as Edward Hopper shaped her understanding of loneliness as a shared experience. Kinsella is interested in the relationship formed between artist, viewer, and subject, especially when solitude is depicted. She hopes that viewers who encounter loneliness in her work may feel less isolated, recognizing companionship through shared emotional experience. Alongside this, beauty remains a central value. In the midst of grief and uncertainty, she looks for moments of quiet grace—light, color, and everyday sensations that offer strength and persistence.
Balancing creative work with life in Los Angeles requires constant negotiation. Teaching, exhibitions, networking, and daily responsibilities compete for time and energy, making the protection of studio time essential. Kinsella continues to practice rest as a necessary counterbalance to burnout, learning to slow down in order to sustain her work. She encourages emerging artists to keep making, to experiment freely, to seek genuine critique and friendship, and to look widely across artistic styles when developing their own voice.
Looking ahead, Kinsella is especially interested in collaboration with writers. Lyrics, poetry, and literature often inform her visual thinking, and she is drawn to the possibilities that emerge when language and image intersect. Through her work, she ultimately hopes to leave viewers with a simple invitation: to notice beauty in everyday life and to recognize its quiet capacity to sustain us.
