About the Artist

  

     Kuki Hargrave is an award-winning Arizona artist living and working in Prescott, Arizona. Her original paintings and prints are represented worldwide in galleries, museums, private collections and publications. Born in Hollywood, California in 1949, the artist grew up loving art, history, western movies and the great outdoors. Creative from an early age, Kuki began showing her original oils and watercolors in art galleries and shows in Orange County when she was 15 years old. Her family supported and encouraged her artistic endeavors. She has been a working artist for over 50 years, and has been creating digital composite mixed-media paintings from her photographs for the last ten years.

     Kuki attended Orange Coast College and the University of California Irvine in Southern California. An avid history buff and western reenactor, Kuki and a companion packed up on two burros and in 1983 completed a 2000+ mile walk from Big Bear, California to Trout Lake, Washington. Dressed in handmade buckskins and carrying black powder guns, tipi and accessories from the 1820 Fur Trade Era, the artist traveled the highways and backcountry of California, Oregon and Washington State. The trip provided the research and inspiration for numerous paintings exhibited and sold in the Columbia River Gorge Region. In 1993, she released “Wagons at South Pass,” a limited-edition print for Oregon’s Oregon Trail Sesquicentennial Celebration.

     An Arizona resident for 26 years, Kuki and her husband Tom moved to Prescott in 2010. Kuki is an active artist, with a national and local following, with hometown shows at The Mountain Artists Guild, Prescott Center for the Arts, ‘Tis Gallery, and  the Ian Russell Gallery on Whiskey Row.

     In 2019, her work “Fab Town” appeared on the cover of Prescott Living Magazine. In 2020, the City of Prescott purchased her work “Homeward Bound” which was presented to the hotel owners during the ribbon cutting ceremony for the opening of the new Hilton Garden Inn in Prescott.

     In 2021, her work “Monsoon” was selected as the official poster for the Arizona Cowboy Poets Gathering for 2023.

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Upcoming this year...

    Look for Kuki’s work at Prescott’s Phippen Museum Invitational Click Western Show in October of 2022, at the Desert Caballeros Western Museum “West of Center” show, Summer 2022 in Wickenburg, Arizona, as a featured artist for June 2022 at the Ian Russell Gallery of Fine Art on Whiskey Row, and as a continuing juried artist at the Wickenburg Art Club Gallery in Wickenburg, Arizona.