Kimberly Burnett’s evocative oil paintings explore isolation, identity, and domestic space in her deeply personal debut at the Miller Art Museum
July 18, 2025—The Miller Art Museum is excited to announce the opening of Sequestered Shadows, a compelling solo exhibition by Milwaukee-based emerging artist Kimberly Burnett, on view in downtown Sturgeon Bay August 2 – September 20, 2025. Featuring 35 intimate oil paintings, Sequestered Shadows invites viewers into a richly layered domestic world shaped by memory, duty, and quiet resilience. An artist reception is scheduled for Friday, August 1, 2025, from 5 – 7 pm to celebrate the opening of the exhibition. Light refreshments will be served and live music will be provided by Craig Schultz.
Kimberly Burnett, Conjugation, oil.Drawing deeply from her childhood in rural North Carolina, Burnett constructs introspective scenes using her own likeness and those of her family members. The resulting compositions portray solitary figures caught in moments of stillness and subtle motion, exploring the tension between personal identity and domestic expectation. Her works transform everyday spaces into quiet stages of psychological complexity—places to hide, to watch, to endure.
“A person is shadows and smears and drips,” Burnett says. “Lines create form, colors create a relationship.”
With this philosophy at its heart, Sequestered Shadows is a study in emotional nuance. Burnett’s use of color becomes both a narrative tool and a mood map, giving life to the silent rituals of care, confinement, and self-expression. Each canvas hums with the weight of the unseen and the unspoken—doorways cracked open, windows offering unreachable light, and figures tethered to their surroundings by duty and longing.
“This exhibition is an extraordinary debut for a remarkable new voice in contemporary figurative painting,” says Elizabeth Meissner-Gigstead, executive director at the Miller Art Museum. “Burnett’s ability to evoke such depth of feeling through gesture, color, and form is both striking and deeply moving. We’re honored to bring her work to Door County audiences.”
Kimberly Burnett is a self-taught contemporary artist and illustrator residing in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Known for her style of “fractured realism,” Burnett works primarily in oil and charcoal. Her art draws on her formative years in rural North Carolina—surrounded by forests and homesteads—which cultivated a lifelong connection to the emotional textures of domestic space. A passionate storyteller, she has told people that she’s been an artist since the age of 2. Her work reveals strong classical influences from with realism being broken apart a little by the bits of color she sees around her. Her love of the Old Masters and the beauty of nature is revealed in her work. Her representational work often centers on figure and portrait, with recurring attention to hands as narrative focal points, revealing unspoken stories through gesture and posture. Burnett has exhibited across the Midwest, including solo and group shows at institutions like the Evanston Arts Center, Wausau Museum of Contemporary Art, and Trout Museum of Art.
Sequestered Shadows is presented with financial support from The Cordon Family Foundation, Door County Medical Center, the MMG Foundation, Huehns with additional grant support from the Wisconsin Arts Board with funds from the State of Wisconsin and the National Endowment for the Arts.