Kathleen Cochran Zimbicki

Kathleen Cochran Zimbicki, gallery founder, artist, arts advocate, and teacher has devoted half a century to creating and promoting art. She was born and raised in a wooded area of Midway, Pennsylvania. Growing up in a musical family, she thrived in a creative environment but soon realized that her greatest passion was not music. It was drawing and painting. 

Kathleen worked in various media but soon gravitated to plein air painting and watercolor. The woods of her childhood were her early inspiration. Its creatures, real and imagined, still peer out from her works.

In 1955, Kathleen married Mike Zimbicki, settled in Rennerdale, Pennsylvania, and raised four children. She studied with American artist Joseph Shepler of Chatham College and later with Austrian-born American painter and graphic designer Henry Koerner. She traveled extensively, studied and painted in Europe, and taught in the United States, France, Italy, Spain, and Albania. She has exhibited her art in more than a dozen countries, and her artwork is in private and public collections in the United States, Italy, the UK, Australia, and Canada.

For 30 years, she exhibited the works of hundreds of artists at Studio Z, the gallery she founded in 1976 on Pittsburgh’s South Side. In 1986 she designed costumes for the World Premier of Pittsburgh Ballet’s “Don Juan.”  In 2002, The Pittsburgh Post Gazette included Kathleen as one of the ‘50 Cultural Leaders of Pittsburgh’.  She was a 2004 Master Visual Artists: Preserving the Legacy (MVA) honoree, and curator for subsequent exhibitions. Kathleen was the driving force behind reviving MVA for its sixth exhibition in 2013 and its seventh in 2020. In 2006, she was awarded the first lifetime achievement award from Pittsburgh Center for the Arts (PCA). As President in 2010, she led Associate Artists of Pittsburgh (AAP) through its 100th Annual Exhibition with a magnificent celebration at Carnegie Museum of Art.

Kathleen states “My art has been called magic realism – dreamlike fantasy. I do have unusual critters in my paintings! Art has been so important in my life, and I am always exploring new things. Although I have had big ups and downs, in some respects I have been very lucky.  For instance, watercolor painting has always made me happy…and I think people are happier when they experience and live with original art, not just copies.”

During the pandemic, Kathleen painted over 300 watercolor paintings of houses in Rennerdale, which have been published in a book, Remembering Rennerdale, in 2022.