Meet Kristen
Kristen Coates has spent fifteen years building a world, and she is not finished.
From her gallery on Bellevue Avenue in Newport, Rhode Island, she works across painting, curation, interior design, and creative direction with the conviction that no detail is too small to obsess over. That obsession is what makes her spaces feel inevitable. It is what makes her work feel alive.
"I find the through-line to a great collection is always the individual's personality on full display." — Kristen Coates
Kristen is the founder of her eponymous gallery, now entering its fifteenth season, a living studio that brings together original paintings, thoughtful curation, and an approach to interiors that treats every room as an authored work.
Her abstract paintings are informed by travel, color theory, and a deep attentiveness to how art inhabits a space. Her palette is bold where it needs to be and quiet where it counts. Her work has been collected around the globe and shown continuously from Bellevue Avenue, which remains one of Newport's most distinctive creative destinations.
Alongside her studio practice, Kristen works with a small number of clients each year through her art and design advisory, shaping interiors, placing art, and sourcing objects with the same obsessive sensitivity she brings to her own world. Recent projects include Pen Craig Cottage, a historic Newport property featured in Architectural Digest Poland and Elle Croatia, The John Goddard House, and The Gardener's Cottage.
In 2026, Kristen founded KRSTN Editions, a private collecting circle for those who want to engage with art at a deeper level. Equal parts membership, conversation, and curation, it is an extension of the belief that collecting should feel personal, considered, and alive.
Her On Holiday artist residency practice takes her work into the world, to Venice, to Paris, to the places that have always fed serious creative practice and brings those influences back into the studio, the gallery, and the page.
Kristen writes. This year she has committed to a book, a document of her creative process, her evolving aesthetic philosophy, and the world she is continuously building. Her current project is a methodology for living with intention, rooted in the conviction that the permission to trust your own taste is something no one else can give you.
Her work has been featured in Architectural Digest Poland, and Elle Croatia.
Image Macrae Marron
"With an enchanting allure and charismatic nature, Coates proves that anything is achievable if you set your sights high." — Aver Magazine