Kaylee Bender is a lifelong artist born in Pittsburgh, PA and based in Denver,CO. She is a queer, black artist drawn to painting, portraiture, poetry, music, and community organizing as vehicles of liberation for our community. Inspired by jazz and the blues, her practice celebrates art as motion and disruption.
Her art explores, beauty, culture, resilience, and history through surreal imaginations of human nature and our diverse stories, including work for MLB Allstar Game, the Denver Art Museum, and the Children’s Hospital of Colorado. Her community engagement is centered on art’s role in building a sense of identity in the community and its role in our emotional and physical well-being. She mentors with RedLine’s Youth Art Mentoring programs and launched the “Colfax Cares” public art and mutual aid project in 2023 to better serve these goals.
Her practice integrates the larger issues of loss of communal practices and freedom of expression and discusses contemporary methods of segregation based on socioeconomic status. Her role is to help to make art and free expression a part of daily life for all community members: improving access to the arts on a grand scale is to permeate and disrupt the caste system, starting with ourselves and the community that surrounds us.