APRIL KINSER | BIO  

April Kinser has pursued parallel careers in the visual arts, education, and sustainable flower farming and floral design. After working in higher education for over 20 years her primary focus is making art that is inspired by her longtime passion for nature and especially flowers.

Kinser has been exhibiting paintings and works on paper since 1980 and sited her first site-specific public artwork in 1982.  In 1992 she was awarded a New York Foundation for the Arts, NYFA Fellowship in Architecture, for her public art for the previous 10 years that were sited mostly in New York City. Shortly after moving from Brooklyn to the Mid-Hudson Valley in 2003 Kinser added to her creative process growing and working with sustainable flowers and has been a leading Slow Flowers movement advocate in the Hudson Valley. All of her artwork has been about connecting people with and honoring nature. Her flower work as an artist and a farmer-florist blossomed into a small sustainable flower farm just outside of Kingston, NY from 2004-2018. During that time she had a farm stand on her property to highlight flowers that she grew sustainably without harmful chemicals and pesticides. Kinser has been commissioned to create sustainable floral installations for special events and was commissioned from 1984-2001 to annually design and produce cast concrete pavers with inlaid brass and bronze for Celebrity Path, a walkway at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden that honors famous Brooklynites with over 100 pavers.

Kinser’s works on paper are in several public collections in New York City including the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Bristol Myers Squibb Company, Sanford C. Bernstein and Company, O.S.L. Shipping Company, Brooklyn Union Gas Company at Metrotech, and the Donegal County Arts Commission, in Donegal, Ireland. Her public art has been sited in Central Park in New York City, the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, the Promenade Park and the Empire State Park in Brooklyn, on the Brooklyn Bridge and on the Staten Island Ferry, Pier One on the Brooklyn waterfront, and at Art Awareness in the Catskills of New York.  Grants and awards for her public art have come from various organizations including Artists Space, the Brooklyn Arts Council, Bankers Trust, and Art Awareness in Lexington, NY with funding from the National Endowment for the Arts.

April Kinser holds an MFA from Pratt institute, and a BA from Portland State University. Prior to graduate school she studied drawing and painting at the Art Student’s League in New York City with Robert Beverly Hale and Julian Levi.