Full CV

Kevin Umaña (b. 1989, Los Angeles, CA) is an artist who lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.  Spending his early years between Los Angeles and El Salvador, Umaña’s personal history has profoundly shaped his visual language. In El Salvador, he was immersed in a rural environment rich with natural textures, vibrant flora, and traditional crafts. While in Los Angeles, he confronted the intensity of city life and the pressures of assimilation. This duality seeded the fragmented forms and layered symbolism that define his art today. His practice continues to carry echoes of Latin American patterns, nature’s geometry, and American architectural influences, all reimagined through abstraction. Umaña’s recent works, “hybrid paintings,” combine glazed ceramics on painted canvas and fuse together conflicting styles—mess and order, biomorphic and geometric, thin and thick, matte and sheen. 

Umaña received his B.F.A from San Francisco State University in 2014. In 2025, Umaña was a recipient of the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award. He has completed residencies at the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation (2024); Anderson Ranch (2024); Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program (2023-24); Archie Bray Foundation for the Ceramic Arts, Helena, MT (2023); The Center for Book Arts, New York (2019); Plop Residency, London, England (2018); and SIM Residency, Reykjavik, Iceland (2018). In 2017, Umaña created a permanent installation at The United Nations Headquarters in New York City. Institutions owning his work include The United Nations Art Collection, New York; Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse, NY; Munson, Utica, NY; Fidelity Mutual Funds Collection; Center for Book Arts Library, New York; and The Marin Museum of Contemporary Art, Novato, CA. In 2026, Umaña will be participating in the MacDowell Fellowship in New Hampshire.