Felice S. Kent

Born April 4th, 1971, in Davenport, Iowa, Felice Kent spent the first year of her life in Iowa before moving to Kalamazoo and than Lansing, Michigan until the age of nine. The oldest of three children, Felice participated in regular school activities as well as general art classes.

At age 9, Felice and her family moved to Phoenix, Arizona where she finished her K-8 and continued with her general high school education as well as vocational photography classes within the Deer Valley School District (VICA). Four years of studio photography, studied under Bill Scott, marked the beginning of a lifelong interest in the arts.

After high school, Felice was investigating schools for Photography, but ended up spending three years working towards a Marketing/Business degree from Northern Arizona University and quit the degree program based on the fact that Felice new there was something missing from her studies. She took six months away from the university and signed up for an art class at the community college in order to figure out what curriculum she would commit to. During this process, she realized, with the help of a friend’s father, Rob Freeman, she was meant to pursue an art degree. In the past, art had always been considered a hobby or a luxury. Felice had not considered a career in art until this moment.

At the age of twenty-eight, Felice earned her concurrent BFA degree from Arizona State University in Sculpture and Painting. This is where the technical skills of art making and the vocabulary for her art started to intertwine. She studied under Mary Bates, Jim White, and Lou Alquist. Felice also had the opportunity to work with visiting artists Al Price and Cecile Arcari- Glas by which introduced her to new information and ideas for which she could communicate visually. During her education at ASU, Felice also traveled to Japan, Scotland, London, Amsterdam, and Ireland through the universities exchange program. She lived in Edinburgh, Scotland for six months where she met Fiona Jappy, which later they would connect in the United States for graduate school.

After earning her BFA, Felice attended graduate school at Southern Illinois University of Carbondale and graduated with her MFA in Sculpture. She worked closely with Professor Tanya Synar, Jerry Monteith and Erin Palmer for a period of three years. During this period, she had the opportunity to travel to France within the university structure. Felice also visited various states in the US for the purpose of learning more about the cast iron world. Felice had been working with professor Synar at SIU-C as a graduate assistant foundry technician and learned about the methods of iron casting through assisting Synar’s classes and traveling to the Johnson Atelier in New Jersey and Sloss in Birmingham, Alabama.

Felice is concerned with gender, domesticity, and forms of abuse in her artwork. She employs a multitude of materials for making her work and believes in the statement that “The World is Your Resource”. She enjoys the process of learning and digesting new ways of thinking and formulating ideas. Her strength in the artistic exploration is the ability to connect with the deep regions of the self and speak of difficult subject matter through the visual process.

Currently, Felice once again resides in Phoenix, AZ and continues her work in sculpting, drawing, and photography.