Kristine McKenna

Kristine McKenna is an American journalist, critic and art curator best known for her interviews with artists, writers, thinkers, filmmakers and musicians. Many of these have been collected in ''Book of Changes'' (2001) and ''Talk to Her'' (2004). Among the people she has interviewed and written about most often over the years are Exene Cervenka, Leonard Cohen, David Lynch, Captain Beefheart, Brian Eno and Dan Hicks.

Career

McKenna wrote for the ''Los Angeles Times'' from 1977 through 1998 and was one of the first mainstream journalists chronicling the early L.A. punk rock scene. She was Music Editor for influential avant-garde arts publication '' Wet'' and West Coast Editor of NME. Her profiles and criticism have appeared in ''Artforum'', ''The New York Times'', ''ARTnews'', ''Vanity Fair'', ''The Washington Post'', ''Rolling Stone'' and many other publications. She was awarded a National Endowment for the Arts Administration grant (1976) and a Critics Fellowship from the National Gallery of Art (1991). She has contributed to many programs by radio artist Joe Frank.

McKenna co-curated the 1998 exhibition Forming: the Early Days of L.A. Punk, for Track 16 Gallery in Santa Monica. She was co-curator of ''Semina Culture: Wallace Berman & his Circle'', a traveling group exhibition that opened at the Santa Monica Museum of Art in 2005. She is producer and co-writer of '' The Cool School'', a documentary about L.A.'s first avant-garde gallery, and her book, ''The Ferus Gallery: A Place to Begin'', was published by Steidl in 2009.

Her 2007 monograph on the photography of Wallace Berman, ''Wallace Berman Photographs'', co-written with Lorraine Wild,
was selected as one of the 50 best art books of the year by the AIGA. In 2009, she curated ''She: Work by Wallace Berman & Richard Prince'', for the Michael Kohn Gallery in Los Angeles. In 2010 McKenna curated ''The Beautiful and the Damned'', a show of photographs of L.A.'s early punk scene by Ann Summa. Her 2011 survey exhibition of photographer Charles Brittin was accompanied by the artist's monograph, ''Charles Brittin: West & South''.

In 2010 she partnered with Donna Wingate and Lorraine Wild to launch the publishing imprint Foggy Notion Books.

In October 2015 it was announced that she was co-writing filmmaker David Lynch's "quasi-memoir" titled ''Life & Work''. The book, retitled ''Room to Dream,'' was published in June 2018. She has participated in Lynch's "Festival of Disruption," doing onstage interviews with Lynch, Frank Gehry, Ed Ruscha, Sheryl Lee and others.

Musician Dan Hicks spent hours on the phone with McKenna every Friday for several years before his death in 2016, telling her his life story. She edited the conversations into Hicks' posthumous autobiography, ''I Scare Myself'', published in 2017.

Books

*''Book of Changes'', Seattle: Fantagraphics Books, 2001.
*''Talk to Her'', Seattle: Fantagraphics Books, 2004.
*''Semina Culture: Wallace Berman & his Circle'', written and edited with Michael Duncan, New York, New York: Distributed Art Publishers, Inc., 2005.
*''Wallace Berman Photographs'', written and edited with Lorraine Wild, Santa Monica, CA, RoseGallery/Distributed Art Publishers, Inc., 2007.
*''She: Work by Wallace Berman & Richard Prince'', Kohn Gallery/Distributed Art Publishers, Inc., 2009.
*''The Ferus Gallery: A Place to Begin'', Göttingen, Germany: Steidl, 2009.
*''The Beautiful & the Damned: Photographs by Ann Summa'', Los Angeles, California: Foggy Notion Books, 2010.
*''Charles Brittin: West & South'', Los Angeles, California: Foggy Notion Books, 2011.
*''Richard Prince: Collected Writings'', Los Angeles, California: Foggy Notion Books, 2011.
*''Notes From a Revolution: Com/co, the Diggers & the Haight'', edited with David Hollander, Los Angeles, California: Foggy Notion Books, 2012.
*''Room to Dream'', written with David Lynch, Random House, 2018.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:McKenna, Kristine
Living people
American women journalists
American art curators
Los Angeles Times people
Year of birth missing (living people)
21st-century American women
American women curators