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Kim Anno

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Kim Anno
Born (1958-12-19) December 19, 1958 (age 67)
Los Angeles, California, United States
OccupationsVisual artist, educator
Known forAbstract painting, photography, filmmaking
Websitekimanno.com

Kim Anno (born December 19, 1958) is an American painter, photographer, and filmmaker known for her work in abstraction, large-format photography, and experimental and documentary film.[1][2] She has served as a professor at California College of the Arts (CCA) in San Francisco since 1996, and was chair of its painting department as of 2012.[3] She is also the founder of Wild Projects, a social-practice arts nonprofit.[4] In 2024 she received a Guggenheim Fellowship, and in 2025 her first feature documentary, ¡Quba!, about the LGBTQ+ rights movement in Cuba, premiered at the Havana Film Festival New York.[5][6]

Early life and education

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Kim Anno was born in Los Angeles, California, to a Japanese-Polish father and a mother of mixed heritage; her father was a physicist and her mother a nurse and civil rights activist. She was raised near the ocean on the city's west side and has said she came of age amid the social and political movements of the 1970s, citing the era's mass gatherings as early influences on her work.[7]

Anno earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts from San Francisco State University in 1982[8] and a Master of Fine Arts from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1985.[1][7] She studied at the Feminist Studio Workshop, a non-accredited women's art school in downtown Los Angeles, where she was influenced by graphic designer Sheila Levrant de Bretteville and interdisciplinary artist Suzanne Lacy, both associated with the Feminist art movement in the United States.[9]

Influences

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In her introduction to the monograph Rebel Splendor: Kim Anno (2023), curator Alla Efimova described Anno as "a radical spirit who revels in the beauty of the world and its people," writing that across painting, experimental video, murals, social-practice projects, and documentary film, Anno combines outrage at injustice and environmental catastrophe with a persistent sense of magnificence.[10] Efimova organized the volume around four aspects of Anno's practice: her work as a studio artist producing paintings, photographs, videos, and books; as a producer of large-scale events and an experimental filmmaker; as director of the feature documentary ¡Quba!; and as a mentor, activist, and social-practice artist, reflecting the degree to which Anno's work moves across these media rather than treating them as separate practices.[10]

Writing in the same volume, art historian Tirza True Latimer has argued that the distinctive character of Anno's early paintings arises from a combination of traditional Asian water-based painting techniques and European modernism.[11] John Zarobell, also writing in Rebel Splendor, has discussed Anno's use of flux as a recurring metaphor, technique, and subject across her ongoing film series Men and Women in Water Cities.[12] Art historian Marci Kwon has traced a throughline in Anno's practice from her early formation as a feminist artist in Los Angeles to her 2022 artist residency at Stanford University, describing Anno's work as refusing a distinction between the art world and the world at large.[13]

Recurring themes in her work include ecology and climate change, "the joy and consequences of technology," and the language of abstraction as it appears in religious and ritual art.[14] Working on wood, aluminum, and canvas, she has pushed her painting practice toward the limits of abstraction,[15] and has said she intends her abstract compositions to invite viewers to become participants, bringing their own experience to the interpretation of the work.[16] Around 2008 her work began to incorporate narrative, which she has linked to her subsequent move into film, video installation, and large-format photography series.[17]

Career

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Early career and painting

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Anno's early career included painting public murals, among them a 1989 mural project noted in the Oakland Tribune[18] and a 1991 commission for the University of California, Davis, described in the Sacramento Bee as using mural-making as a means of conflict resolution on campus.[19] Her paintings and photography were reviewed in the Peninsula Times Tribune as early as 1985[20] and, later, by critic Mark Van Proyen in Artweek following her exhibition at Patricia Sweetow Gallery.[15]

Anno has exhibited widely, including in Don't Panic at the 2011 United Nations Climate Change Conference and Men and Women in Water Cities at the 2012 Convention,[3] as well as at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive and the Museum of Modern Art, Rio de Janeiro, and in Women on the Silk Road, a traveling exhibition of artists influenced by Asian art and culture.[14] In January 2024, her paintings were shown in GODZILLA: Echoes from the 1990s Asian American Arts Network at Eric Firestone Gallery in New York, a survey of the Godzilla Asian American Arts Network collective founded in 1990; the exhibition, and Anno's paintings specifically, were noted in a New York Times gallery guide by critic Martha Schwendener.[21]

Teaching and commissions

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According to Anno's curriculum vitae, her teaching appointments have included California College of Arts and Crafts/California College of the Arts (associate professor of painting, 1996 to present, with an earlier lectureship in design in 1990 to 1991); the University of California, Berkeley (visiting lecturer in painting, drawing, and design, 1992 to 1996); Stanford University (visiting lecturer, 1994 to 1995); the San Francisco Art Institute (visiting artist, 1993 to 1996); California State University, Hayward (lecturer, 1994); Louisiana State University (assistant professor, 1990 to 1991); Ohio State University (lecturer, 1989 to 1990); Cabrillo College (instructor, 1987 to 1989); and Napa Valley College (instructor, 1985 to 1986). The 1992 to 1994 University of California, Berkeley appointment is independently confirmed in her 1992 Oakland Tribune profile.[7]

Anno's commissions have included a 1991 mural for UC Davis,[19] and, per her CV, further commissions from the San Francisco Arts Commission and the City of Oakland's public art program, a 2010 to 2012 project supported by the Zellerbach Foundation and SFMOMA trustee Phyllis Moldaw, and a series of three limited-edition artist's books produced with poet Anne Carson and published by St. Benedict's/St. John's University's One Crow Press: Sleep (2007), The Mirror of Simple Souls (2003), and The Albertine Work Out (2014).[22]

Filmmaking

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Beginning around 2009, after two decades as a painter, Anno began making short films, developing an interdisciplinary, largely experimental body of work that includes the Men and Women in Water Cities series, comprising Water City, Durban (2012), Water City, Berkeley (2014), and Water City, Ipswich (2019), screened internationally at venues including the Goethe-Institut Johannesburg, Kala Art Institute, the New Media Festival in Seoul, and the University of Suffolk, among others.[23] Reviewing Water City, Berkeley for Daily Serving, critic John Zarobell discussed its staging as a video installation and live performance at Kala Art Institute.[17] ¡Quba! (2025) is her first feature-length documentary.

¡Quba! (2025)

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¡Quba! is a 71-minute Spanish-language documentary, with English subtitles, written, directed, and produced by Anno through Wild Projects. It traces the Cuban LGBTQ+ rights movement leading to the 2022 Family Code, which legalized same-sex marriage and adoption, centering on Ramón Silverio, artistic director of the cultural space El Mejunje in Santa Clara, and Adela Hernández, described as Cuba's first openly transgender elected official, alongside activists Ulises Padrón Suárez and the Santiago-based collective Las Isabelas (Ana Canet and Maritza Estrada), with Mariela Castro, director of Cuba's National Center for Sex Education, also featured. The film was shot in Havana, Santa Clara, Caibarién, Matanzas, and Santiago de Cuba, with cinematography by Roberto Chile and Ashley James, co-producing by Kyung Lee, and executive producing by Julia Robertson.[24]

The film had its world premiere at the 2025 Havana Film Festival New York.[6] It was subsequently an official selection at the Florida Film Festival, Outfest Perú, the Havana Glasgow Film Festival/Scottish Queer International Film Festival, Cinemística (Granada, Spain), and Way Out West Film Festival (Albuquerque), with further screenings in Cuba, Seattle, Cleveland, and San Francisco through 2026.[24]

Reviews were largely positive. Amber Wilkinson of Eye for Film wrote that the film emphasizes recent progress while still acknowledging Cuba's history of persecuting LGBTQ+ people.[25] Film Threat and High on Films also reviewed it favorably, and it holds a positive score on Rotten Tomatoes.[26][27] Writing for Cinema Crazed, Emillie Black praised Roberto Chile's cinematography and the film's pacing,[28] and Victor Pineyro of Seventh Art Studio described the film as illuminating tensions between personal freedom and ideological structure in Cuba.[29] In an interview with the Bay Area Reporter, Anno said the film was the first of her projects conceived from the outset as a straightforward documentary, in contrast to her earlier, more experimental short films.[4]

Awards and honors

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Selected exhibitions and screenings

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Drawn from Anno's curriculum vitae, unless otherwise noted:

  • 2024: GODZILLA: Echoes from the 1990s Asian American Arts Network, Eric Firestone Gallery, New York[21]
  • 2023: Animals' Reading Room, Anglim/Trimble Gallery, San Francisco, with accompanying monograph
  • 2022: Spectacle of Nature, Coulter Gallery, Stanford University
  • 2021: Long Arc of Day, public glass mural commission, San Francisco International Airport
  • 2019: Nature Studies, Minnesota Street Project, San Francisco
  • 2012: Water City, Durban, Goethe-Institut, Johannesburg
  • 2009: Liquescent, Patricia Sweetow Gallery, San Francisco
  • 2005: Fleishhacker Foundation Eureka Fellowship exhibition, Berkeley Art Museum
  • 1999: Biennial, Orange County Museum of Art

Selected filmography

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Per Anno's filmography document:[23]

  • 2011: Men and Women in Water Cities, Chapter One (14 min)
  • 2012: Water City, Durban (6 min)
  • 2014: Water City, Berkeley (25 min)[17]
  • 2017: Canto One (5 min), animation with Charles Woodman
  • 2019: Water City, Ipswich (5 min), United Kingdom
  • 2021: H/our Breath (5 min)
  • 2023: Signs (7 min), collection of the Asian Art Museum, San Francisco
  • 2025: ¡Quba! (71 min), feature documentary

Publications

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  • Anno, Kim, with Anne Carson. The Mirror of Simple Souls (2003), limited-edition letterpress book, St. Benedict's Press, Minnesota.[22]
  • Anno, Kim, with Anne Carson. The Albertine Work Out (2014), artist's book, St. Ben's Literary Arts Institute, Minnesota.[22]
  • Anno, Kim. Rebel Splendor, monograph edited by Alla Efimova, Anglim/Trimble Gallery (2023).[10]
  • Anno, Kim, ed. Laura Kina and Jan Christian Bernabe. "Queer Traveler," in Queering Contemporary Asian American Art, University of Washington Press (2015).[9]

References

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  1. 1 2 Hallmark, Kara Kelley (2007). Encyclopedia of Asian American Artists. Greenwood Publishing Group. pp. 7–8. ISBN 978-0313334511.
  2. ↑ Hotchkiss, Sarah (August 31, 2015). "Bay Area Artists Dive into the Big Blue". KQED.
  3. 1 2 3 "Kim Anno". California College of the Arts faculty page.
  4. 1 2 "Cuba's untold tale: Kim Anno's feature film, '¡Quba!,' at SF DocFest and Queer Women of Color Film Fest". Bay Area Reporter.
  5. 1 2 "Kim Anno". John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, Fellows directory.
  6. 1 2 "¡Quba! Press Kit". Wild Projects. 2025.
  7. 1 2 3 Chumsai, Areeya (July 12, 1992). "Biographic In The Arts: Kim Anno". Oakland Tribune. p. 55.
  8. ↑ Mullins, Jenny (May 1, 2012). "Kim Anno, San Francisco, California". The Studio Visit.
  9. 1 2 Anno, Kim (2015). "Queer Traveler". In Kina, Laura; Bernabe, Jan Christian (eds.). Queering Contemporary Asian American Art. University of Washington Press.
  10. 1 2 3 Efimova, Alla (2023). "Introduction". In Efimova, Alla (ed.). Rebel Splendor: Kim Anno. San Francisco: Anglim/Trimble Gallery.
  11. ↑ Latimer, Tirza True (2023). "Imaging". In Efimova, Alla (ed.). Rebel Splendor: Kim Anno. San Francisco: Anglim/Trimble Gallery.
  12. ↑ Zarobell, John (2023). "Directing". In Efimova, Alla (ed.). Rebel Splendor: Kim Anno. San Francisco: Anglim/Trimble Gallery.
  13. 1 2 Kwon, Marci (2023). "Kim Anno: Making Space". In Efimova, Alla (ed.). Rebel Splendor: Kim Anno. San Francisco: Anglim/Trimble Gallery.
  14. 1 2 "Biography: Kim Anno". Women Artists of the American West, Purdue University. 2005.
  15. 1 2 Van Proyen, Mark (September 2004). "Kim Anno at Patricia Sweetow Gallery". Artweek. 35 (7). ISSN 0004-4121.
  16. ↑ Fazzolari, Bruno (2011). "Conversation with Kim Anno". Art Practical.
  17. 1 2 3 Zarobell, John (December 22, 2013). "Kim Anno: Water City Berkeley at Kala Art Institute". Daily Serving.
  18. ↑ Cutler, J. (August 23, 1989). "People remember leadership and his past". Oakland Tribune. p. 2.
  19. 1 2 Vargas, Dale (June 4, 1991). "Art becomes a means for conflict resolution with UC Davis mural". The Sacramento Bee. p. 13.
  20. ↑ Tyson, Janet (July 2, 1985). "Landscape paintings and photos: Strong works, but little continuity". The Peninsula Times Tribune. p. 18.
  21. 1 2 Schwendener, Martha (February 2024). "What to See in N.Y.C. Galleries in February". The New York Times.
  22. 1 2 3 4 Anno, Kim. "Curriculum vitae". kimanno.com / wildprojects.org.
  23. 1 2 Anno, Kim. "Filmography document". kimanno.com / wildprojects.org.
  24. 1 2 3 "¡Quba! Press Kit". Wild Projects. 2025.
  25. ↑ Wilkinson, Amber. "¡Quba! (2024) Movie Review". Eye for Film.
  26. ↑ "¡Quba! Homepage, Reviews". Film Threat.
  27. ↑ "¡Quba!". Rotten Tomatoes.
  28. ↑ Black, Emillie. "Review of ¡Quba!". Cinema Crazed.
  29. ↑ Pineyro, Victor. "Review of ¡Quba!". Seventh Art Studio.
  30. ↑ "Four faculty members and one alum from California College of the Arts awarded the 2024 Guggenheim Fellowship". CCA Newsroom. April 23, 2024.
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