Kirsha Kaechele (born 1976) is an American contemporary art curator, artist, and practitioner of sustainable building design. She is founder of KKProjects, Life is Art Foundation.
Early life
Kaechele was born in Topanga Canyon, California, and raised in Guam, Micronesia and Japan. Her father was a retired RAND Corporation aerospace engineer and early practitioner of Rolfing.
Career
In 1994, Kaechele began an informal education with travel over land to more than fifty countries in seven years, a hands-on investigation of the idea that life designs itself. During this period, she met and mentored with a variety of thinkers, including Biosphere 2 creator John P. Allen, chemist Albert Hoffman, writers Tom Robbins and John C. Lilly, John Perry Barlow, Rodleen Getsic, psychiatrist Oscar Janiger, artist Peter Nadin and German architects building sustainably on a Sannyasin commune in Maui, Hawaii.
In 1995, she worked with the Shipibo ayahuasca shamans in the Peruvian Amazon. In 1996, she performed with La Mama theater in New York City.
On and off Kaechele attended University of California, Santa Cruz, but in 1999, left just short of graduation to work with VH1 producer Tad Low on a travel show. The production took her to remote southern Lebanon, where she remained with a group of writers, philosophers and historians in Sur (Tyre), a nonpartisan observer in Hezbollah territory.
In 2000 Kaechele moved to New Orleans and joined the downtown art scene, collaborating with artist Matt Vis (Kid Calculator) of Generic Art Solutions on performance art projects and backup dancing for musicians Quintron and Miss Pussycat, MC Tracheotomy and MC Sweet Tea. She was a member of the 9th Ward Marching Band, an avant-garde marching band founded by Quintron.
In 2006 Kaechele founded Life is Art Foundation | KKProjects, an art space composed of five deteriorating houses in the St. Roch neighborhood of New Orleans. The foundation invited local and international artists to create site-specific installations utilizing the houses and surrounding ecological and social environment as medium. Exhibitions included artists from emerging to Tony Oursler, Mel Chin, Keith Sonnier and Robert Rauschenberg.
The Life is Art Foundation was founded on an appreciation for ecological systems and natural order. The application of systems-based thinking to life and art was its core mission, as expressed through projects that married art with architecture, ecology, agriculture and human social order. The foundation served as a test site for ideas in these fields.
In 2010 Kaechele left KKProjects and moved to Tasmania to join David Walsh and MONA (Museum of Old and New Art). She transformed four of the New Orleans art installation houses into 24 Carrot, a community garden where children grow, cook and sell organic produce. The project introduces vegetables to a food desert, inspires healthy eating and teaches entrepreneurial skills. The project’s 2018 expansion includes a food truck, designed by children in the program, from which they sell dishes prepared with produce they grow. Menus are created by the kids in collaboration with celebrity chefs.
Kaechele founded MONA’s 24 Carrot program in Tasmania, a sister garden project in partnership with the Tasmanian Department of Education and private funders. 24 Carrot operates in thirteen primary schools in neighbourhoods of greatest need.
Kaechele's curatorial work in the US included a land art exhibition of a living sugar cane field sculpture in rural Louisiana by Norwegian artist Anne Senstad, large-scale, site-specific installations in New Orleans’ City Park and Botanical Gardens for Voodoo Experience, and a medical marijuana farm in California, Life is Art West, which donated all proceeds to the arts.
In 2015 Kaechele returned to New Orleans to stage a gun buyback as a conceptual artwork / performance during the New Orleans Biennial, Prospect 3. It was the largest gun buyback in New Orleans’ history and played with libertarian values by using private enterprise and the free market to create gun control. The exhibition, set in an 8th Ward car wash, was promoted on billboards and rap radio stations throughout the city, and opened with performances by bounce and rap artists Big Freedia, Hot Boy Ronald and Mr.Serv On. The installation included a recording studio, The Embassy, where youth could lay tracks with celebrated local rappers for free. The Embassy, intended to run for three months, was so popular that Kaechele decided to keep it open and build a permanent space to house the studio- as part of a larger school.