DS Kinsel
Practice
BOOM Concepts: This video provides a view into my community base field building practice that centers on cultural space-keeping and creative placemaking. This aspect of my creative practice operates out of and through BOOM Concepts. Featured in this video are community and institutional partners, BOOM Concepts artists, studio assistants.
Bio
D.S. Kinsel is an award winning creative entrepreneur and cultural agitator. He expresses his creativity through the mediums of painting, window display, installation, curating, Action-Painting, Non-Traditional Performance And #HASHTAGS. Kinsel's work puts focus on themes of space keeping, urban tradition, hip-hop, informalism and cultural re-appropriation. D.S. has served creative residencies at Most Wanted Fine Art, Artist Image Resource, The Homewood Residency Program, Kelly Strayhorn Theater/Pittsburgh Public Schools Summer Dreamers Academy, Carnegie Mellon University Digital Arts Studio, AS220 and the Sedona Summer Artist Colony. He is the curator of #ACTIVISTprint, a collaborative public art program of The Andy Warhol Museum and recently served as the Penn Avenue Creative Residency Coordinator at the Kelly Strayhorn Theater.
D.S. is the co-founder of Boom Concepts, a creative hub dedicated to the advancement of black and brown artists representing marginalized communities. BOOM Concepts is located in Pittsburgh and is funded by The Heinz Endowments and The Pittsburgh Foundation. BOOM Concepts focuses on youth, Community Artists, neighborhood partners to identify contemporary expressions of social justice through drama, dance, music, visual art, and technology. D.S is a board member of Pittsburgh Center for Creative REuse, and serves on the advisory board For The Heinz Endowments Transformative Arts Process. A former AmeriCorps Public Ally member, D.S. has also been recognized as an awardee of the Pittsburgh Courier Fab 40, Pittsburgh Magazine PUMP 40 Under 40, Pgh Tech Council Creative of The Year, and the Pittsburgh Post Gazette’s "Top Ten People To Meet in 2016" and the Incline’s “Who’s Next” for 2018.
For the past four years, Kinsel has been developing an open source public art project called #hashtagsAREtheNEWprotestSIGNS that exists in public dialogue and the digital space. It has been presented at PearlArts Studios, The Wix Lounge NYC, Youth Leading Change Symposium: The State of Our Union, Creative Mornings PGH, Pittsburgh Tech Council's CREATE Festival, and the 2016 & 2017 Allied Media Conference.
