The Ohio Artist Registry (OAR) is an exciting opportunity for artists to share their work, connect with the creative community, and establish an online presence—all on a free, virtual platform! The OAR encourages artists working in all art forms, throughout Ohio and beyond, to create a profile, which allows them to better promote themselves and their work. Being listed in the OAR provides artists with new opportunities to share their work with clients, galleries, patrons, and audiences. A listing in the OAR does not confer an endorsement, approval, or verification by the Ohio Arts Council.
For more information, contact Kathy Signorino, artist programs director, at kathy.signorino@oac.ohio.gov or 614-728-6140.
2025 Ohio Artist Registry Juried Exhibition
Kate Santucci
Dayton OH 45410 US Cell Phone: (937)416-4613 Website: Kate Huser Santucci
Bio
Kate Huser Santucci lives and works in Dayton, Ohio. She graduated from Wright State University in 1994 with a BFA in visual art with a concentration in sculpture. She completed a residency in encaustic painting with artist Patricia Seggebruch in 2019, and was the recipient of a Montgomery County Arts and Cultural District and Culture Works Artist Opportunity Grant in both 2020 and 2025. She was recently awarded a residency in France to take place in the autumn of 2025.
Kate has an upcoming show at Sinclair Community College in Dayton, opening May 2025. Her work has most recently been shown at a solo show at the Dutoit Gallery at Front Street in Dayton, Edison State in Piqua, Ohio, Art Source Ohio Gallery in New Bremen, the Springfield Museum of Art, the Edward A. Dixon Gallery in Dayton, Studios on High in Columbus, and the Dayton Society of Artists. Public work includes a mural in downtown Dayton on E. 3rd St., and a series of 3 pieces for the Southeast Branch of the Dayton Metro Library. Her works are part of private collections in Dayton OH, Cincinnati OH, Los Angeles CA, St. Joseph MI, Brooklyn NY, and Lexington KY.
Kate started her career as a sculptor and is now working in encaustic and mixed media. The work combines beeswax, damar resin, and pigment to create luminous surfaces with many layers. She is fascinated by the natural world, and finds those themes recurring in her work as she explores our connection to that world and our personal evolution within it. Her latest body of work examines our tendency to see meaning in mark making, and explore the way we instinctively seek to make connection by assigning meaning to randomness, be that graffiti, constellations, dreams, crop circles, runes, clouds, religious symbols, paintings on cave walls, tea leaves, the patterns worms leave under the bark of tree branches, or the abstract placement of letters that make up sigils. This search for clues, for patterns, and for inspiration is what makes us human, as we long for connections and try to figure out where we fit into the larger picture.
Artist Statement
I am drawn as an artist to the examination of how human beings are interconnected with our environment, and how we move through it and communicate with one another. I work primarily in encaustic painting, which is a mixture of beeswax and damar resin mixed with pigments and applied in layers. Each piece involves using writing to set an intention and direction for the work. I use illegible script, mark making, and asemic writing as part of an underpainting created with charcoal, graphite and encaustic medium. My current body of work combines both abstract mark making and figurative realism to help convey my thoughts on how we interpret meaning and context in our struggle to understand one another, our world, and our role in it. My work involves multiple layers and textures, inviting the viewer to look deeper into the piece and glimpse imagery floating beneath the surface of the wax, while allowing the top most layers of encaustic paints and pigment stick to come forward and engage the viewer in the narrative.