Artist Bio

Anna Kaminski is a Minneapolis-based artist, educator, and designer working across sculpture, installation, photography, painting, and socially engaged creative practice. She began her career in a photojournalistic context during the Iraq War, an experience that shaped her long-standing interest in how people inhabit space socially, materially, and ethically. Over time, her work expanded through painting and ceramics into immersive projects that explore attention, presence, and the environments we move through every day.

Kaminski’s practice is animated by philosophical and theological inquiry, but remains grounded in the pleasures of making. She moves fluidly across modalities and scales, from socially engaged, relational work to intimate acts of making, such as painting a landscape on a bright afternoon or building functional objects. This movement between forms reflects her belief that meaning is discovered not only through critique, but through sustained attention to materials, process, and place.

Alongside her studio practice, Kaminski is an experienced art educator and program designer. She has taught courses ranging from painting and furniture design to advanced fine arts and has developed curricula that integrate history, craftsmanship, and critical thinking. She understands making not simply as skill-building, but as a formative practice, one that cultivates discipline, judgment, and care.

Kaminski is also the founder of Oak & Pine Design Company, a sustainable interior design studio rooted in a high/low approach that blends vintage and handcrafted elements. Her work in design and fine art functions in parallel, each concerned with material culture, stewardship, and the quiet ways environments shape daily life.

Her artistic perspective is deeply informed by years of work in social justice organizing and direct client care within social service agencies, particularly with women, returning citizens, and other marginalized communities. These experiences continue to ground her work in relationship, dignity, and responsibility.

Kaminski has exhibited work in galleries in Maryland, Washington, D.C., Colorado, and the Minneapolis–St. Paul area, and was part of the inaugural artist residency at Halcyon, a Washington, D.C. based foundation. She holds a Master’s degree from St. John’s College and is currently completing a second Master’s degree in Catholic Studies at the University of St. Thomas.

Artist Statement

“The things that we love tell us what we are.”
Thomas Aquinas

I return to this line often, not as a conclusion but as a discipline. My practice is grounded in the belief that what we attend to, what we choose to make, notice, and care for, slowly forms us. Art, for me, is not merely expressive. It is formative. It shapes perception, judgment, and responsibility over time.

Working across sculpture, photography, installation, and painting, I create environments that invite encounter rather than consumption. Some projects are socially engaged and relational, while others are quieter and more intimate. I am interested in placing viewers within situations that slow them down, encourage attentiveness, and reveal how systems, spaces, and habits shape behavior.

My work is informed by classical philosophy and theology, alongside contemporary theories of relational aesthetics. These frameworks help me ask questions about power, complacency, dignity, and presence without relying on didacticism. Rather than offering arguments, I work through metaphor, material, and spatial experience, allowing meaning to emerge through use, proximity, and time.

While my practice often engages ethical and social concerns, it also makes room for beauty without justification. Light across a landscape, the weight of wood in the hand, and the pleasure of careful craftsmanship are integral to the work. These quieter acts are not a retreat from thought, but part of it.

My work as an artist is inseparable from my work as an educator or previously my work as a social justice organizer. In both spaces, I am interested in formation, how sustained practices of attention and care shape how we think and act in the world. Whether in the classroom, the studio, or the gallery, my aim is to create conditions where meaning can be encountered slowly, and where responsibility is practiced rather than performed.