This week we sit down at the Cowee School with resident artist Kim Keelor. 

Kim Keelor is a fiber and textile artist and painter living in the mountains of far western North Carolina, and a resident artist at the Cowee School Arts & Heritage Center there. She also works and teaches in Charleston and areas in the upstate of South Carolina. Keelor’s work has been selected for more than twenty juried exhibitions since she began showing professionally in 2020. She was awarded the Best of Show prize at the Palmetto Hands Fine Craft 2024 Annual Juried Exhibition out of more than 300 entries, also earning Honorable Mention and Traveling Show prizes there in earlier years. Her work has been exhibited or sold at the Bascom and the Fine Arts League of Cary gallery in North Carolina; the Middleton Place Museum Shop, Charleston Artist Guild and Preservation Society of Charleston in South Carolina and locations in Georgia.

Keelor’s most recent work, a mixed fiber installation titled Tawney, Bourgeois, O’Keeffe, and the Hats of the Master Potter, was selected for a juried exhibition at the Bascom in Highlands, North Carolina. It incorporates design elements from artists who influence her practice, including the 85-year-old local master potter who challenged her to make something from a bag of old wool hats he’d worn and stored in his barn for decades..

Keelor is currently leading a collaborative, large-scale, climate crisis art installation being constructed in her studio that began in the fall of 2023; partially funded by a N.C. Arts Council grant, to be exhibited in the Carolinas in late 2025 and 2026.

Keelor intends to compel the mind and enliven the spirit while promoting planet health and positive mindsets. She strives to master the ancient textile process of felt making through sculptural works and teaches felting in the Carolinas. 

For more on Kim and her work list: carolinaartworks.com