A Conversation with Artist Katharine McKenna

From 1977-1978, Katharine McKenna worked for the Museum of Northern Arizona and spent time documenting Northern Arizona people and places. Hear from McKenna about her Northern Arizona ethnology and archeology work from her recent publications, “The Paleontologists Daughter” and “Navajo Collecting Trip.” During this period of her life, McKenna documented her experiences through her writing as well as photography.

Although she is known for her landscape paintings, McKenna has been taking photographs since she was ten years old when she received her first camera, a Kodak Instamatic. Throughout the mid-seventies, she took many black and white photographs with a Pentax and developed them in a darkroom. These photos are examples of a wide range of subject matter K.L. McKenna approached with the camera, some of which are reminiscent of her later paintings in composition and place.

McKenna’s inspiration is rooted in childhood experiences with her paleontologist father, whose expeditions with the American Museum of Natural History in New York exposed her to the American West, a territory that represents to her the concept of wide open spaces, dirt roads and the last frontier.