Kai Gaynor (she/her/they) is a Colorado Springs-based visual artist focused on creating arts-based experiences around culture and community connection.  She believes in the transformative power of the arts, seeking ways to support BIPOC and Queer communities in their city.

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      Previously Kai had been a retail based artist selling art prints, jewelry and other goods at stores around the state. Her focus now is to expand her paintings, art and community buidling experience to continue to build immersive worlds to conventional (galleries and museums) and unconventional spaces.  Kai believes in expanding how art is experienced within spaces and how her experience as a Black women can help bridge the gap in to arts and cultural experiences for a broad spectrum of experiences. 

       Currently, Kai works as an art instructor and community liaison for Concrete Couch. She is  contracted as an oral historian for a food histroy project in Hillside lead by Food to Power and Colorado College, and continues to do gather oral history data for the Pioneers Museum of Colorado Springs. Collecting oral histories is a cultural  passion of Kai's, as she believes that doing this work helps inform and strengthen her work as a community arts activist. Lastly she is the current President of the Pikes Peak Arts Council,where she helps empower individual artist lives in her city. 

 

In 2024, she completed the  “Emerging Arts Leader” program with the Bee Vradenburg Foundation, which lead to her success of her first immersive exhibition called "Transcendent Femme". Transcendent Femme was her premier month long exhibit that fused mental health and the arts to help empower the greater COS to consider the journey to the self as the first stop on the path to a brighter more connected future. 

Overall, Kai Gaynor has been creating community events within her community for over 7 years. 

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Honorable mentions:

- Big Ol' Picnic (2023)

- Big Ol' Mural (2022): First

- Art Flow Collective "AFC Nights" (2021): A summer series of artist nights hosted at Switchback Coffee House that encouraged a wide variety of artist to connect over a night of singing arts and crafts, open mic, poetry and dance. 

- Vice President and Head of Events of the Black Student Union at Pikes Peak State College (2018-2019)

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Hosted workshops for:

- Colorado Springs Mobile Arts Truck 

- High Roots Wellness at Commonspirit Hospital

- Colorado College

- Lil' Miss Story Hour

- etc...