The Café Royal Cultural Foundation NYC has awarded a 2025 Fall Visual Grant to Kian McKeown for a new body of work to be included in an upcoming exhibition at 205 Hudson gallery in Tribeca NY.  

Kian McKeown will be exhibiting a suite of colored pencil drawings and large multi-media sculptures in his MFA thesis exhibition at the 205 Hudson Hunter College Art Gallery. The exhibition is titled “Body Bureau Bunker” and features 7 artists working across various mediums. 

Technically skilled and conceptually creative, Kian McKeown utilizes a range of media including drawing, sculpture, and installation to create diverse artworks, stylistically varied yet cumulatively engaging. His works are made in response to everyday waking fantasies and desires to escape; skewing scenes and objects of the everyday into syntheses of pain, awkwardness, shame and sex. 

The exhibition will feature works that showcase common hardware alongside or within the body as a way to reflect on our relationship with technology and industry. Commercial hardware consists of utilitarian accessories that brace materials together. The forms and shape of accessories like brackets, screws, and hooks are designed to complete the task of connection between countless different types of objects. In McKeown’s drawings, he references this task as a metaphor for human embrace, synthesizing hardware that supports the body in a sensual way. McKeown is imagining scenarios in which analogue technologies have an inevitable, intertwined relationship with the human body. 

This work considers the way we are supported by technology in all aspects of our everyday lives. Within the discussion of disabled or differently-abled people, a misconception arises that able-bodied people are radically self-sufficient and completely capable of moving through the world without support outside of themselves. However, to simply walk down the street, we need to wear shoes. Some people ride bicycles. These can all be considered mobility assistance devices. In other words, everyone requires assistance, whether by technology or the aid of other people, to exist in the society that we have built for ourselves. 

Kian is a 2021 BFA recipient of The Cooper Union, a 2024 Participant of Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and is currently an MFA candidate at Hunter College and a National Arts Club fellow.

Please visit Kian’s Website and Instagram for more information.