Galleries

“Kelynn Alder is a fantastic artist, a serious professional and a wonderful human being. Her empathy with her subjects comes across clearly in her faithful, rich and nuanced portraiture, and she is truly a master of a wide range of techniques. Gifted, experienced and centered, Kelynn Alder is the real thing.”

“Kelynn Alder’s Coney Island collection is like a wild dream you know you should wake up from, but it’s too fascinating to leave just yet. And despite the artifice of the subjects’ costumes, their joy is genuine. Alder paints happiness as real as the relief of misfits who finally found a welcoming tribe.”

“Through her art, Kelynn provides the viewer with an inspiring way to experience her lifetime of focused commitment to documenting people, their cultures and oftentimes an unseen view of the corners of the world in which we live.”

“What Arthur B. Davies did for Ashcan artists and Warhol did for Campbell’s Soup cans, Kelynn Alder has done for Coney Island. With her trained eye and expert painterly technique, she has transfigured a slice of mundane life into the realm of high art. Like her wondrous Mexican street scenes, she has shed her kindly artistic light on what is often viewed as the quintessence of vulgarity and enabled us to see the beauty and the energy in America’s ionic Amusement Park. In so doing she has made some important icons of her own.”

As a painter, illustrator, and printmaker, Kelynn Alder is a dynamic artist. As guest curator of the Long Island Museum’s award-winning exhibition, SOMOS/We Are (2023), she developed a diverse and wonderful checklist of 82 artists of Latino heritage who have lived and/or worked on Long Island. LIM has been fortunate to add Kelynn’s work My America, to its permanent collection. This poignant, large-format portrait tells a moving story of diaspora and difficult passage. It’s the story of immigrant Irma Zea, originally from Mexico, who gained asylum here in Suffolk County only after a long detention and family separation. This acquisition has a powerful narrative that extends the Museum’s portrait collection into the 21st century with a story of relevance to all of us.

Alder paints history. A vivid colorist, a visual essayist, and a sensitive portraitist keenly aware of Mexican cultural heritage and the cycle of life and death, Kelynn Z. Alder is unparalleled in her use of Indigenous, political and religious iconography to create complex arrangements of memory, political commentary, and symbolism. Her imagery lifts up those who continue important traditions and rituals, and makes us aware of our place in the world and within the arc of human history.

In her show entitled Animal Spirits and Ancient Rituals at Gallery North, she delves into the ancestral rituals, beliefs and rites of her heritage to create vivid paintings and complex mono-prints and drawings.