Mark Kelner
Person TypeArtist
BiographyMark Kelner is a visual artist and filmmaker based in Washington, DC and Brooklyn. A graduate of George Mason University, where he studied with the esteemed novelist Vasily Aksyonov, his work has appeared in Artenol, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, and The Times among other media outlets. His practice centers on the distortion of ubiquitous mass — cigarette labels, oil and gas station logos, fast food signs, and retail culture, among other touchstones. In 2020, his first museum acquisition was to the Zuzeum Art Centre in Riga, Latvia, as part of their exhibition, “American Dreams.” In 2019, his solo exhibition “Solaris: Shelter for the Next Cold War,” garnered wide acclaim and over 13,000 visitors. In 2015, he was a featured guest on PBS’s Charlie Rose concerning the intersection of art, culture, politics, and Russia. Of late, he has shown at Ronald Feldman Gallery in New York and the Librairie du Globe in Paris. Of note, over the past year, he has won grants from the National Endowments for the Arts, the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, the Washington Project for the Arts, and the Contemporary Foundation for the Arts. Prior to the art world, he worked with filmmaker Steven Spielberg, coordinating the production of video testimonies of Holocaust survivors in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union for the USC Shoah Foundation Institute. Mr. Kelner is represented by Ober Gallery (Kent, Connecticut), Galerie Blue Square (Washington, DC), and Lazy Mike (Los Angeles). In 2020, he showed his first outdoor installation, a 120-foot mural titled, “Pleasure’s Promise” at Culture House in Washington, DC, four blocks from the US Capitol.
