Kirsha Kaechele
Kirsha Kaechele (born 1976) is an American curator, artist, and advocate for sustainable design. She founded KKProjects and the Life is Art Foundation.
She was born in Topanga Canyon, California, and grew up in Guam and Japan. Her father was a RAND aerospace engineer and an early practitioner of Rolfing. In 1994 she began traveling to more than fifty countries over seven years, learning from many thinkers and testing ideas about how life and systems design themselves.
In the mid-1990s she connected with diverse people and places, including ayahuasca shaman groups in the Peruvian Amazon and performance work in New York. She attended the University of California, Santa Cruz off and on, but left in 1999 to help create a travel show with VH1 producer Tad Low, which took her to the Middle East.
In 2000 she moved to New Orleans, joined the city’s downtown art scene, and worked on performance projects and dancing for musicians. She also helped form an avant-garde marching band. In 2006 she started Life is Art Foundation and KKProjects in five deteriorating houses in New Orleans’ St. Roch neighborhood. The project invited artists to make site-specific work that blended art with ecology, architecture, and community life.
In 2010 Kaechele moved to Tasmania to join David Walsh at the Museum of Old and New Art (MONA). She transformed four of the New Orleans houses into 24 Carrot, a community garden where children grow and sell organic produce. The program expanded to include a food truck and a cooking program run by the kids with celebrity chefs. 24 Carrot now operates in many Tasmanian schools.
Her curatorial work in the United States included large, site-specific projects like a living sugar cane field sculpture in Louisiana and exhibitions in New Orleans’ City Park and Botanical Gardens. She also created Life is Art West, a medical marijuana farm in California whose proceeds supported the arts.
In 2015 she staged a gun buyback as a conceptual artwork during New Orleans’ Prospect.3 Biennial. The project, set in an eight-ward car wash, aimed to use private enterprise and the market to discuss gun control. The Embassy recording studio opened there for youth to record music for free, and it eventually became a permanent part of a planned new school.
Kaechele has been involved in plans to build a new, community-focused school in New Orleans with architects Assemble and Room 11. The school would offer free programs for 14–25 year olds, including The Embassy recording studio, a hacking school, art school, beauty and fashion programs, and a culinary art program, all combining science, technology, and social enterprise.
MONA’s P5 1 L0V3 Y0U project is one of her long-running conceptual works. In 2019 she launched Eat the Problem at MONA, a show about invasive species that also included a cookbook and public feasts. The project drew mixed reactions from critics and readers.
From 2005 to 2010 she bought five old houses in North Villere Street in St. Roch, turning them into part of KKProjects. Some houses were turned into art installations. After moving to Tasmania, she left the properties unattended, and most fell into disrepair or were demolished. She faced tax and code issues and said the plan was always to replace them with green space.
In 2024 a Tasmanian tribunal required that MONA’s Ladies Lounge, an exhibit that allowed women-only entry, also admit men. Kaechele testified, saying the performance was meant as a statement about equality and rights. The tribunal’s decision was controversial, and in 2024 the Tasmanian Supreme Court later overturned that ruling, noting the installation could be exempt to promote equal opportunity for a disadvantaged group. Kaechele commented that the ruling shows women have strength, and she continued to work as a curator at MONA.
Kaechele lives in Tasmania and remains a curator at MONA. She married art collector and gambler David Walsh in March 2014, and they have one child, Sunday Walsh.
This page was last edited on 2 February 2026, at 06:57 (CET).