Amber Kempthorn explores time and nostalgia through drawing. She is a graduate of Hiram College, the Maryland Institute College of Art, and the Cranbrook Academy of Art where she received her MFA in Sculpture in 2008. Her work has been exhibited across the U.S. and was included in the inaugural Front International Cleveland Triennial for Contemporary Art and recently in More is More: Visual Richness in Contemporary Art at the Akron Art Museum. In 2019 she received an Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award and a $54,000 Knight Arts Challenge Akron grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation for her animation project, Ordinary Magic: A Sunday in the Cuyahoga Valley, a series of four animations visually translating Benjamin Britten’s Four Sea Interludes (1945). Blending traditional hand-drawn and contemporary computer animation, Ordinary Magic builds on the tradition of playfully merging classical music with animation, premiering with live accompaniment by the Akron Symphony Orchestra in October 2022. Also in 2022, Kempthorn was awarded a Cleveland Arts Prize Award for Emerging Artist and was the recipient of the Dan Tranberg Teaching Excellence Award.
Kempthorn is an Assistant Professor of the Drawing Department at the Cleveland Institute of Art. She lives and works in Hiram, Ohio.
Photo by Robert Muller
“Nobody can teach the geography of the undiscovered. All (one) can do is encourage the will to explore, plus impress upon the inexperienced a few of the dos and don’ts of voyaging.”
Wallace Stegner