Kelly Rae Daugherty

Fine Art Photographer & Painter
kelly@kellydaughertyphotography.com | www.krdphotography.com

Artist Statement

I create from the quiet space where grief, ritual, and resistance meet. My photography is less about image-making than about witnessing—building a visual language that speaks from the edges, from what is often overlooked or silenced.

For over two decades, I’ve worked outside traditional art-world structures—not from rejection, but necessity. My images are too personal, too spiritually grounded, and too emotionally direct to conform to systems that favor neutrality or spectacle.

My practice moves between the constructed and the organic, the surreal and the documentarian. I use the body—often my own—as a site of memory, contradiction, and repair. Objects such as fruit, gauze, and gesture are not props but vessels for meaning, invitations to slow seeing and deeper feeling.

I’m not interested in fame or commodification. I’m interested in truth—even when it isolates, even when it resists categorization. My work continues to evolve in quiet defiance, grounded in the belief that art is a form of communion: a place where clarity, resistance, and mystery coexist.

This is art made not for validation, but for survival, integrity, and the conviction that the margins often hold the clearest vision.

Biography

In her early twenties, Daugherty was immersed in the renowned Poetics Program at SUNY Buffalo, studying with Charles Bernstein, Robert Creeley, and Irving Feldman. In those formative years, she explored how language fractures, elides, and reveals—how it creates pictures through absence as much as presence.

In her thirties, she moved west to the San Francisco Art Institute, where she developed her visual practice among artists such as Henry Wessel, Carlos Villa, and Bruce McGaw. Wessel encouraged her to build a “picture dictionary” in her mind—to see the photograph before lifting the camera, cultivating a visual intuition shaped by light, space, and honesty. That perceptual discipline balanced her poetic roots, anchoring her work in both symbol and surface, gesture and geometry.

Now based in Portland, Maine, Daugherty maintains an expansive archive of over 50,000 photographs alongside bodies of work in painting and sculpture. Her practice weaves performance, symbolism, grief, embodiment, and spiritual inquiry—always asking what it means to see, to witness, and to remember.

Curriculum Vitae

Education

2006 · San Francisco Art Institute, BFA
— Studied with Henry Wessel and Bruce McGaw

Selected Exhibitions

2025 · Botanicals: Flora of the World, Decagon Gallery (online)
2025 · Oracle’s Grove at Deering Oaks, Portland, Maine
2010 – 2011 · San Francisco Museum of Modern Art Artist Gallery, San Francisco, CA
2009 · Gregg Deane Gallery, Palo Alto, CA

Publications & Features

2024 · The Café Review
2024 · Model Society
2011 · PH Magazine (Dec)
2011 · Sinescope Magazine (Nov)
2010 · Disenthralled Magazine (June)
2009 · CIRCUMFLEKS Magazine (May)
Curated features: Photography Served, W5RAN

Collections

Private collections via SFMOMA Artist Gallery placements (2010 – 2011)
Selected private collections in the United States and Europe

Lectures & Presentations

2024 · Women in Street Photography — Guest Lecture, Hunt’s Photo Education
Sold-out live demo and lecture on emotional presence and authenticity in contemporary street photography. Received outstanding feedback and multiple follow-up requests.

Representation

2017 · Paintings-Gault Gallery, Oregon

Selected Works in Progress

Flora as Oracle — Botanical series exploring plants as symbols and spiritual messengers (2023 – present)
Maine in the Margins — Documentary project on Maine’s overlooked corners, people, and landscapes
Between the Seen — Conceptual self-portrait and model-based series investigating identity, gesture, and performance (2010 – 2013; ongoing)