Kevin Booher is a visual artist, educator and innovator.  After earning his B.F.A. from the University of Notre Dame followed by his M.F.A. from the University of Cincinnati, Kevin was immediately recognized for his artistic vision as a young artist with a distinct viewpoint, winning several best-in-show awards from the “Up and Coming Artists Show(s)” from the Cincinnati Art Museum’s (CAM) 1972 – 1975 annual shows held in the 580 Building.

Interestingly, one such show served to re-direct Kevin's work away from solely a professional visual artist to becoming a deeply invested professor of fine arts for much of his professional career, incorporating his own perspective gained as a working artist himself.  Seeking a new art instructor with the potential to lead and develop new art education curricula for their respective universities, several higher education institutions frequented the CAM shows for just this recruiting purpose. One institution outlined a position that immediately appealed to Kevin, Northern Kentucky University (NKU). Envisioning a democratizing potential to offer and extend visual arts education to predominately first-generation college students from rural communities at that time - including many former students who had never had the opportunity to visit a single art museum prior to entering college, for example - Kevin eagerly accepted this challenge, seeing a rare opportunity to facilitate new worlds of critical thinking, emotional experience and development of individual viewpoints by the students to be gained through their visual arts education. 

After promptly joining the NKU faculty in 1975, from 1975 through 2006, Kevin translated and fused his own passion for the important role of self-expression by the visual artist by teaching, challenging and inspiring his art students at NKU, not only the fundamentals of art history/appreciation and studio art skills, but to reach beyond traditional top-down teaching approaches to focus on each student's journey of self-development, including identifying and expressing their own artistic viewpoints. Over the course of his professorship with NKU, Professor Booher taught drawing, art appreciation, printmaking (including hand drawn and photo mechanical intaglio, lithography, relief and screen-printing), and notably pioneered the school’s first computer imaging and graphic arts programs for NKU’s School of the Arts. He further built and led professional development courses for his peers inside and outside NKU, concerning advanced and environmentally friendly printing techniques, as well as all things related to imaging, graphic arts, professional graphics software and business skills for artists.

Finding great rewards as a full-time educator, Kevin de-emphasized exhibition and sale of his own artwork during this time, only responding to certain selective opportunities to exhibit where feasible around his teaching and fatherhood priorities, including selective shows from 1972 through 1993 that led to the sale of his artwork to various private, corporate and public organizations, such as the Estate of Edward Albee, New York City, New York, ARCO, Los Angeles, California and the Cincinnati Public Library, Cincinnati, Ohio, among others. Notably, Kevin is particularly grateful for the opportunity to have led the  Covington Local Heroes Mural Project in 1995, which enabled diverse collaboration between community leaders, art students and local citizen voices. Kevin is also recognized for bringing the work of artists Donald Judd, Red Grooms, Doug Kinsey and Rob Hare to multiple Northern Kentucky and Cincinnati universities and other art galleries, museums, and organizations.  Kevin remains grateful for the considerable influence his own former educators, Professor Doug Kinsey and Professor Don Vogl of the University of Notre Dame, had, not only on his artmaking skills, but as role models for his own teaching style imbued with a sense of joie de vivre. 

After enjoying a rewarding, multi-decade career as a professor of fine arts, in 2019, Kevin returned to the studio in earnest, dedicating his professional time exclusively to his life and career as a working artist again, as well as enjoying other collaborative artmaking experiences with fellow artists. Responding to requests collaborate and learn new techniques, Kevin opened his printmaking studio to mentor and collaborate with other working artists, including both independents, corporate artists and graphic designers, who besides often being former university students of Kevin's, are also more importantly lifelong friends.

His current works consist of various printmaking, oil and acrylics paintings and aluminum cast sculptures. Two recent series, Lighthouses: The Bearer of Light and Darkness and Lighthouses: False Navigation Aides are informed by Kevin's ongoing study of history, and, more specifically, the forces that both bind and erode democracies, their citizenry and their institutions.

To learn more about Kevin's perspectives about his life and role as an artist, please see his Artist Statement  below.