b. 1980
Kristy Cavaretta is an artist and mother of three living on the Southern Maine seacoast. She enjoys exploring the minutiae of domestic life through a variety of media.
Cavaretta earned her undergraduate degree in Visual and Media Arts from Boston’s Emerson College and a Graphic Design Certificate from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design. In 2012 she moved to the seacoast with her husband after a decade of working in the film industry in Los Angeles. She worked as a graphic designer until she had her first child in 2016 and continued to work as a freelance designer for numerous nonprofit organizations, including the Ogunquit Museum of American Art (2015-2019) and Old York Historical Society (2015-current.) Cavaretta began printmaking in 2014 at Chases Garage in York, Maine in various workshop settings. Since having her children she has leaned into block printing, direct object printing, and collagraph printing for their accessibility and speed. Either the ability to make a piece in a single nap time sitting or chipping away at a larger work little by little over a long period of time.
In 2021 Maine Magazine named Cavaretta one of the years’ artists to watch, in 2023 she held her first solo exhibition at the Rochester Museum of Fine Arts.
Cavaretta teaches printmaking at Chases Garage in York, Maine and is proud to sit on the board of art and wellness non-profit ArtHope ( 2015-present.) In 2024 Cavaretta was honored to become a juried member of the New Hampshire Art Association and the New England Monotype Guild.
“Domestic life and gender roles are considered in this delicate series of chlorophyll prints. I first started experimenting with the medium during the pandemic when I had two babies and like most, was largely housebound. Printing with easily accessible elements found in my suburban yard, the sun, and time, felt natural; while contemplating the sometimes unnatural-feeling position of mother and homemaker I found myself in after decades of personal and professional independence. I am fortunate to witness a unique social experience while raising boy/girl twins. I am amazed by their inherent differences, and also hyper aware of the gendered role I am portraying raising them in a manicured suburban neighborhood while performing the majority of the default caretaking as a woman. How much influence does the way in which I’m raising them actually have? How much has been pre-determined in their unique beings? I use images of my grocery lists and suiting patterns to highlight the polarities, pairing them with naturally occurring plant life. How unnatural can I make this natural element look? Is it still beautiful? The window to experiment with chlorophyll printing in Maine is small, here the leaves are only green for about 10 weeks each year. Exposures take about 2 days of bright sun and a very small percentage expose correctly for me at this stage in my exploration. Given the medium is the leaf itself, there is also an inherent impermanence to these pieces. With continued exposure to light the images will fade and eventually cease to exist.”
Q. If you could offer your younger self any advice at the start of your artistic career, what would it be?”
A. “Just make the damn things. Preciousness will halt the creative process, eventually you have to just start moving your hands and making things, the more you make the more ideas come and the better it all gets.”