Kelly Foster

In the Art Program at Gordon, Kelly teaches art and design classes, stewards the design curriculum, and co-leads the program. In this work, he guides students into skills and dispositions for participating in God's work of reconciliation as responsible artists and designers. 

The variety of work he does as an educator, a designer, an artist, and a writer is linked together by a common exploration of how the spatial and visual dimensions of our embodied experiences connect to our interpersonal interactions. Kelly’s research spans across the disciplines of art and design theory, normative philosophy, and Christian theology to consider how the spaces, objects, and images we design can positively affect our daily interactions with one another, exploring topics such as architecture and race, beauty and justice, and norms for design thinking. 

Kelly’s current creative practice lives somewhere between furniture design and installation art. By making inhabitable spaces at a scale smaller than buildings, combining manual and digital forms of fabrication and sustainable material practices, he thematizes and tests the connections between cultural meaning, everyday utility, and the cultivation of belonging.