In the Artist’s Studio featuring Charlotte Kruk

An artist’s studio serves as both a functional workshop and an exclusive creative space, each in its own way as unique as the artist who occupies it. Glimpses into artists’ studios provide rare and abundant insight into their methods and personalities. 

Charlotte Kruk, like many other artists throughout history, works in her home studio and adjacent, outlying structures and outdoor spaces. The main studio space where Charlotte does most of her work houses a collection of carefully curated chests of drawers filled with conscientiously collated candy wrappers; her trusted sewing machine; racks of brightly colored spools of thread; and works in progress. Everything is informed and inspired by her creative process. Charlotte’s converted garage is replete with an assortment of supplies, tools, and more works in progress, as well as familial mementos including her grandmother’s antique sewing machine table and pieces of furniture hand-upholstered by her grandfather. Her art making process then extends into another structure which serves as a gallery that houses finished works. Its exterior is adorned, from eaves to foundation, with larger than life ceramic reproductions of red and white peppermints. Its interior is an explosion of color, nostalgia, and pure, palpable joy, as it’s crowded with mannequins bedecked in her vibrant candy couture.  

Charlotte Kruk is most recognized for elevating rubbish into art with her wearable sculptures crafted from recognizable, repurposed candy and food wrappers. A reflection of our capitalist and material culture, her figures are literally covered in the packagings of things we consume everyday. She creates her textiles from carefully stitched together “trash” which are then fashionably molded into functional, if somewhat impractical, garments. Charlotte’s sculptures are designed to respond to a culture that too often refers to women as embellishments, or eye candy. Her work initiates, in a whimsical way, a dialogue on packaging, brand association, and power structure while serving as commentary on the gluttony and wastefulness of a disposable, packaged society Evoking a certain humor and extravagance that addresses larger, global issues, Charlotte Kruk aims to make people think about what and how they are consuming on this planet.

Charlotte Kruk was born and raised in Campbell, California. Just before her 4th birthday, she lost her father in a tragic accident, leaving her mother to raise Charlotte and her sister. The charge of caring for two young girls alone motivated Charlotte’s dedicated and determined mother to seek full time employment, leaving Charlotte and her sister in the care of grandparents most afternoons and weekends. Crafting was always an after school activity under the watchful eye and instruction of her maternal grandmother, and nap time was always accompanied by the hum of a sewing machine.  

Charlotte began her college career at University of California, Santa Cruz with a scholarship from her high school art teacher. Charlotte would go on to switch universities and her focus of study from business to physical education, then to communications, then nutrition before finally settling back into art. In 1996, she received a Bachelor of Fine Arts, and in 1999, a Single Subject Credential in Art, both from San Jose State University.  

In tandem with her career as a successful artist, Charlotte is a devoted educator; teaching sculpture arts at Lynbrook High School in San Jose, since 1998. Her work has been featured in solo exhibitions at the Racine Art Museum in Wisconsin, the Environmental Protection Agency’s regional field center in Philadelphia, PA; and more locally at the Triton Museum of Art as well as Works Gallery in San Jose and Michelangelo Gallery in Santa Cruz.  She has also participated in numerous group exhibitions in museums and galleries statewide including the Legion of Honor, in San Francisco, the Morris Graves Museum, in Humboldt, Copia, in Napa, the San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art, and the Richmond Art Center.