North Hills Art Center director earns AAUW Equity Award
Share this post:
On March 11, the American Association of University Women North Hills Branch will present its 2023 Gateway to Equity Award to Kim Freithaler, North Hills Art Center executive director.
According to the AAUW, she embodies the association’s commitment to achieving equity for women and girls by promoting healing through creativity for people of all ages and backgrounds who are working through personal life challenges.
Freithaler’s leadership during the covid-19 pandemic enabled the North Hills Art Center in Ross to obtain new grant funding, remain open safely and increase membership.
She is an award-winning painter who creates portraits of people and animals in oil and acrylics. Her murals are installed at the North Hills Art Center, Northland Public Library, Animal Friends and other public buildings.
Freithaler became president of the art center’s board of directors in 2007 and has been the executive director since 2016. Under her leadership during the pandemic, the center maintained its partnerships with social service agencies.
Through those partnerships, the center fulfilled its mission of providing “healing through creativity” for individuals across the life span by providing free art supplies, art classes and opportunities to display their work for grieving children, victims of intimate partner violence, immigrants, disadvantaged children, youth and families, hospitalized children and their families, military veterans, and elders in residential care.
Freithaler teaches painting at the North Hills Art Center, and taught literacy through art in a Title 1 program for Manhattan public schools.
She is vice president of the West Hills Art League and was the group’s featured artist of the month for March 2017. In 2021, she had a painting displayed in the Children’s Museum’s Museum Lab Portrait Show.
Freithaler was the guest artist demonstrator for the Cranberry Artists Network in December 2022. Also last year, she was awarded an honorable mention in the Merrick Masters Show at the Merrick Gallery in New Brighton.
She earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts from St. John’s University in New York City, where she completed an internship at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She also studied at the Art Students’ League in Manhattan.
For more information about the North Hills Art Center, visit northhillsartcenter.org.