At the Art Garage in Helper, opened in 2023, Kate Kilpatrick’s large-scale paintings weave vintage advertisements, iconic vehicles, and pop culture imagery into narrative-rich meditations on American identity.

I have a new hero. And she’s a Pop artist.

Pop Art is the most—OK, popular—art movement in America, rivaled only by Impressionism. Those French artists looked seriously at modern life as they witnessed its changes: the coming of the steamboat and the railroad, the remodeling of their great, capital city into metropolitan Paris. They celebrated their own gardens and garden parties, saw sunrises and sunsets and a foggy river as if for the first time. Pop Art began later, in Britain, where it displayed a similar interest in current life.

But American Pop is a carbonated beverage of art, as superficial as its subjects: consumer products and celebrities—those, as it’s often said, who are famous just for being famous. These subjects all remain unquestioned. The one exceptional American Pop artist known to me before now has always been Jann Haworth, who began in Pop Art while in Britain, only to bring back to her native American West the visual version of the principle introduced to music by the immortal Gil Scott-Heron, who said that if a song isn’t about anything, it ought to be an instrumental. Haworth takes that to heart, and her art, while clearly Pop in approach, stands apart in always having something penetrating to say about actual lives and values.

Then last week, when I went to check out the First Friday: Small Business and Gallery Stroll, in the antique railroad town of Helper, I stumbled into the Art Garage and met its proprietor, Kate Kilpatrick. Here, at last, was another examiner of things American, which she sorts historically by placing consumer icons among what else was going on during the years they were made. So, from the beginning, instead of just showing off a noble Phaeton, gleaming muscle car, or svelte sports car, she has used these irresistible examples of what has come to be known, now with a heavy note of nostalgia, as the American Century, as an invitation into the social reality of their times.

Recent art often relies on contrasting media and layering to enable singular images to tell stories. Kilpatrick settled early on a formula that employs a flat back wall for her art’s illusionary space: a wall identical to the canvas or panel on which she works. This wall is essentially graffitied, primarily with spray paint, often applied through stencils to produce images from history that she finds through extensive research.

Curiously, while students of other arts are expected to learn how to do such research, today’s painters routinely weaken their effects by creating images solely from their imaginations or based on memories. So to walk into the Art Garage and be confronted with an almost black-and-white collage of accurate images from, for example, the year 1963, combines a documentary narrative with a story’s emotional effect. In one, the familiar, grinning President and First Lady, and their son making his famous salute, bracket a newspaper with a cover image of the same woman shattered by events that took place moments later. But the only actual violence comes with the murder of Lee Oswald by Jack Ruby, while targets spatter the canvas like blood drops. Into this dream-like arena with its incidentally Irish-American story, Kilpatrick has inserted an extremely realistic portrait of the flag-decorated presidential limousine, an image that seizes up when the viewer realizes this is the last such car to have been topless and open, in order to allow the People to get closer to their First Family.

There’s no way an image can convey an experience like a national trauma to someone who hasn’t had it in person, but Kilpatrick’s choice of details and composition may make the painted facts unforgettable in their own way. In a nearly contemporary scene, the Beatles, their antics, and their audience, appear behind a bright yellow Volkswagen Beetle. Who remembers that the Beatles exploded into public awareness and unprecedented success in the same year, 1963?

Kilpatrick reconstructs American childhood with a vivid mix of innocence and absurdity—her layered compositions referencing Looney Tunes, The Oregon Trail, and playground gear to reflect generational memory and cultural imprinting.

Nor are all the defining events so unpleasant. In one not here now but available on the Garage’s superb website, a mid-1950s municipal bus illuminated with Pepsi and Mickey Mouse logos and an image of James Dean surround a more vivid portrait of Rosa Parks posing in her work uniform for her mugshot. The gleaming vehicle that sits before this array recalls how the family car has been, for many Americans, their most expensive investment other than their home—if they have one—and for many became their last refuge and shelter on their way down into poverty. But it also speaks to the way what those who were then known as “African-Americans” took such pride in their cars and clothing: two outlets available for expressing belief in themselves.

Some artists have to be encouraged to break the pattern of their success and do something new. Others can’t be held back from it. Kilpatrick is one of the latter, and over the years her foregrounded subjects have grown to include kids’ BMX bikes and wagons. As their implications grew more youthful, she even abandoned transportation in favor of sports gear and 1950s vintage phonographs. This apparent shift towards a younger population—or an earlier age of the same generation—led to what she has identified as a new body of work.

In her latest, the foreground object is replaced by a person, almost certainly an evocation of the artist herself. Note the spray cans held by the young lady who confronts—and enters into a behavioral dialog with—Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. The justice appears in formal attire, but her eyes turn down in an ambivalent response, so like a judge on the bench, to someone who, while technically breaking the law, does so to express her burgeoning self-awareness and to precociously engage authority in her own life’s experience. At the same time, the painted scenario is deceptively complex.

We are the most visually literate population in history; so much so that we may see what’s going on here without consciously commenting on it. There are two figures here, one being painted by the other, while in reality both are equally the work of Kate Kilpatrick, who has used two contrasting techniques to distinguish the levels of realism. Each in turn has its own narrative. Viewers assign more reality to the young woman doing the painting, but Justice Ginsberg pierces that division, known by its theatrical name, the fourth wall, with her acknowledgment of the artist who has created her.

Then, as Ginsburg aged in office and became infirm, her detractors took to derisively calling her ‘fragile,’ to which she, with her characteristic skill at verbal sparring, replied “Not fragile like a flower; fragile like a bomb.” (As an interesting footnote, a similar exchange was attributed to one of the world’s foremost women artists: Frida Kahlo.) What Kilpatrick has done in her telling is to surround the notorious RBG with nine bombs, eight of them so lightly painted as to qualify as unfulfilled potential, while the ninth is painted as if solid and standing apart from her portrait, though still inside the larger work, and labeled “Fragile.” The implied difference suggests that her legal opinions and other works will have effects beyond her own time and space, as well as beyond those of her colleagues.

To have built and maintained an impressive gallery like the Art Garage and filled it with so many large—and small, since her oil sketches and prints fill boxes along the garage’s corrugated steel or “wood butcher” walls—and extensively researched, elaborately painted artworks, seems like a full time task. But Kilpatrick has also filled the space with other works, including racks full of wearable art—specifically, upscaled flannel shirts that, like Pop artworks in their own form, are “completed” with found fabric ornaments that might have come from participation in uniforms or other elaborate contexts. Then there’s her webpage, which fills in the stories of the art and allows the viewer to envision how any of her large works might look in a customizable home setting. There’s a secret here: while the Art Garage is Kate Kilpatrick’s project, it exists in the context of Helper’s dozen or more galleries, each a personal project of one or more artists. But that is another story.

Kate Kilpatrick, left, looks on as gallery visitors browse art and clothing during Helper’s First Friday stroll. 

Kilpatrick Art Garage is at 80 S. Main Street in Helper, Utah.
Visit https://www.facebook.com/HelpersFirstFriday for more information on Helper’s First Friday Small Business/Gallery Stroll.

All images courtesy of the author.

Geoff Wichert

Geoff Wichert objects to the term critic. He would rather be thought of as a advocate on behalf of those he writes about.