Artist Bio

Kris Newlin is a mixed-media artist with a self-proclaimed fondness for junk. She also has been a licensed professional counselor and a registered art therapist for more than 25 years. She specializes in using art therapy to help people cope with trauma. She has worked with children and adults who have experienced abuse, homelessness, trafficking, and the loss of a loved one to homicide. She says she is drawn to found objects, because they symbolize what she does as a counselor.

“A lot of times the people I see in life feel like society threw them away, abandoned them, rejected them, left them questioning their purpose, or damaged them,” she says. “For me to take those found objects that people would typically throw away and repurpose them into art, into something beautiful, has a lot of meaning to me.”

Kris treats art as a language — the symbols, the colors, and every part of the piece tells part of a story. She says art helps people tell the hard stories that would be difficult to put into words. It has helped her deal with the stories she has heard over her 23 years as a therapist, often counseling people who have experienced high trauma.

Piece Description

Kris’s AAA includes acrylic paint, oil pastel, watercolor, ink, sketching, clippings from the Red Iron and other Kimray publications, cloth, plastic lettering, blueprints, hardware, and other items she thought would fit. The Kimray Mission Statement can be found, as well as other nods to the company’s history.

“There are a lot of little arrows going back and forth because the past and the future and the present are all intermingled at Kimray,” she says. “I kind of pictured someone staying up late at night trying to figure this whole valve thing out, so there’s a coffee stain.”

In the bottom right corner, looking back at this depiction of Kimray past and present, is Kimray founder Garman Kimmell.

“I wanted him looking back, to see that what he did at the beginning of Kimray is still happening today,” Kris says. “I think of art as a language, as a way for people to tell their story. To me, this is the story of Kimray.”