Kristen Letts Kovak is a Pittsburgh-based artist who explores issues of disequilibrium and resilience through her intuitive paintings and drawings. After completing her undergraduate art degrees from Mercyhurst University, she earned her MFA from MICA in 2010. Since 2012, Kovak has taught drawing, applied aesthetics, and visual perception at Carnegie Mellon University, where she also serves as Senior Associate Dean for the College of Fine Arts.

Trained as a representational artist, Kovak’s practice incorporates elements of observation but multiplies them to the point of abstraction. Her work explores states of uncertainty and rides the line between knowing and unknowing as the images progressively shift out of alignment. “The complexity push[es] against the boundary where comprehensible becomes confusion. It remind[s] me of swimming in the ocean, where the destructive power of the water is always present in your mind, even when you feel capable of making it back to shore.”- Eric Lidji

Her work has been shown in over a hundred exhibitions spanning galleries, art centers, universities, and a dozen museums including the Muskegon Museum of Art, Erie Art Museum, State Museum of Pennsylvania, Wildling Art Museum, Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum, Museum of the Red River, and the Woodson Art Museum. Her recent solo exhibitions include Marshall University, York College, the Rosewood Art Center, 707/709 Penn, and the Westmoreland Museum of American Art.

Kovak’s current series, “Bundles” and “Out of Order”, further explore states of disruption. She uses the visceral language of color, form, and materiality to wrestle with the uncertainty of living with chronic illness.