8 Ways to Display Art in Your Kitchen

My husband and I are outdoorsy folks, and I found a John Muir quote and put it on a canvas for the kitchen/dining area that I felt was just what that space needed. The quote reads, “Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in, where Nature may heal and cheer and give strength to body and soul.”

We don’t have a lot of wall space in our quirky 1970s-but-renovated kitchen (and I LOVE art). But like another commenter pointed out, the grease and dust that accumulate on frames and beveled edges would drive me bonkers. So for much-needed hits of color, we used classic subway tile for our backsplash but the grout is electric lime green (matches our front door). Our patterned tea towels are also an artistic moment. And since the side of our fridge is visible from the hallway, that’s where we have our ever-growing gallery wall/collage of fridge magnets from our travels. They do collect some dust and grease but somehow it doesn’t bother me as much, lol.

Over the last decade I’ve gotten into both art and a particular type of antique French porcelain (look at me being cagey in order to keep the limited supply for me. Disgusting). Now it’s all over our vaulted ceiling kitchen, which is 2/3rds kitchen cabinets/appliances on one side of the rectangle and 1/3 kitchen table, walls that I’ve covered with art and porcelain platters, and a tall pine china cabinet/bookcase. A couple of things I learned – 1. I wanted to put some oil paintings directly on the quartz that runs up the walls between the lower and upper cabinets. I bought heavy duty double sided plastic velcro and it works great! Has lasted years and does not entail drilling into the solid stone or tiles. 2. I have an oil painting near the stove – it’s not high quality but I like it. Before I stuck it there on the velcro, I revarnished it several times – this protected the painting enough that I can wipe it down with no worries. 3. I had a bunch of antique French handwritten menu cards but no real way to display them. I found an HR linen covered cork board that was bound in brass, with a brass grid overlay. I replaced the linen with slate blue velvet and pinned all the menus into the grid. That way you have a lot of disparate pieces of paper (or other items) but all grouped together in an organized way that eliminates the feeling of clutter. 4. A really heavy duty platter holder is worth the money it costs off of Etsy. And find the studs!

This was the push I needed. I took a print I’ve had sitting in a corner for a year and taped it to a kitchen cabinet and it looks great and is already making me smile! Wish I could show y’all a picture. I love it.

We have a print of a ski trail map from our favorite mountain. Our kitchen tends to be a hub guests hang in and this piece is an easy conversation starter. Plus we LOVE inviting people to join us on the slopes so it’s opening a fun door for new ski buddies.

For my husband’s birthday one year, I started a cookbook with our recipes that we made during our baby’s first birthday, adding sketches of our baby eating food to each page. It’s grown since then and we flip it open on our kitchen counter doubling as art/dinner inspiration. Fun to look through over the years! Example page below: https://www.instagram.com/reel/DVOa0iLgN4p/

We have a David Shrigley print that features a huge lemon and reads “When life gives you lemons … you must eat the lemon. All of it, including the skin”. We tend to be a grumpy household (in an loving way, lol) and I think it fits us perfectly :-)

In my kitchen I have a little square photograph in a frame of my kids when they were 6 months and 6 years respectively, lying on their backs on green clover and beaming into the camera. it is very sweet and was taken the day my daughter learned to swim and my son was crawling backwards and had to be rescued after backing himself under the sofa.

Every one of these images looks like clutter. None of them show good examples of displaying at in a kitchen. Sigh.

Our kitchen is very compact, so there’s not a lot of wall space for art (I am thinking about taping some art to the door to the creepy basement now though!) But I just recently stuck a postcard of an Eric Carle collage from The Hungry Caterpillar (of all the food that the caterpillar has taken little bites of) right above the light switch. And above the window, where you wouldn’t notice unless you’re really looking, our old neighbors accidentally left behind a kooky painting of a cat and a dog splitting a bottle of wine. It’s not really my taste, so I would have NEVER picked it out myself, but it made us laugh when we both first noticed it, and it seems to belong there now. I don’t think I’ll ever take it down.

We have the framed handwritten menu from the restaurant where we went for lunch after getting our marriage license, and the most perfect painting anyone has ever seen of a chocolate chip cookie ~ by our little boy 🤍

In my kitchen I framed the menu from a Rotary club dinner from 1923 that we found in our walls when we did our reno (featuring “Baked Young Chicken and Creamed Peas”)! And then above my stove is my Dolphin Studio Print of the Month club – thanks to a CoJ rec. My other walls have unique hand-made plates from various ceramicists.

The crookedness of the pear gallery wall makes me queasy, but I love this idea for displaying books, just in general.

Unrelated to my other comment, how do people with a lot of three-dimensional art objects in the kitchen (like the tiles and corks featured in the original post) keep them clean? The art in my kitchen is almost all flat (postcards, prints), but the few three-dimensional objects I keep there (several glass and clay wine bottles) are super-grimy from layers of grease spatter and dust. I can’t imagine dusting/wiping off multiple little bowls, vases, tiles, or figurines on a regular basis…

We have an eat-in kitchen and that is where I spend the biggest chunk of my day by far, cooking, doing dishes, working on my laptop at the kitchen table, and, most importantly, sitting down with my 4 year old son for three meals each day plus occasional snacks. Our table is pushed up against the wall and he sits facing the wall. That wall has become a huge art display/bulletin board/learning opportunity. In addition to a calendar and our weekly schedule, it also hosts postcards, my sons’ art, different alphabets, days of the week listed in different languages, and other items that we look at and talk about daily. We are about to move into a new house with an open-concept living/dining/kitchen area and I will miss having a dedicated kitchen space that is separate from the rest of the house and not as exposed. We will have to do our best to re-create our current setup in the new dining area but it won’t be the same.

i love being a collective friend of coj

I have a small collection of food art that hangs in our tiny apartment kitchen, made up mostly of prints of fancy paintings of popcorn, Kerrygold, chipmunks with a bag of chips, etc. It was all to amuse me during something boring like washing dishes, but my teen complimented the collection the other day and there is no greater validation haha.

I have copies of those vintage small magazine format cookbooks hanging in frames above my sink: Cooking with Condensed Soup, 10 Cakes Husbands Like Best, Gel Cookery, Coconut Glamour Desserts, The Ford Traveler’s Cookbook, etc. I love the imagery and the recipes themselves are so “not modern”, lol.

I sell photography my husband and I have taken around the world which includes food and drink, like a bustling restaurant in Rome’s Trastevere, a just-poured pint of Guinness in a Dublin pub, steam rising from a street food stall in South Korea. The prints make ideal kitchen art (if I say so myself – we have our photography print of Bologna’s tortellini framed in our own kitchen). Here’s a link to our photographs of food, dining and drink: Etsy: https://www.etsy.com/shop/MoandPaulPhotography?ref=seller-platform-mcnav&search_query=Food&page=1#items Our website: https://moandpaulphotography.com/collections/dining-and-clinking

I’ve had a framed poster in my kitchen forever; all it says is “Let There Be Bacon.”

I painted my kitchen walls copper patina (it’s almost a sea foam green color) and the countertops are bright orange. I never would have picked the orange, but it’s so happy and people always comment on how warm our kitchen is. We added a copper bar above the stove to hang pots from which is both convenient and adds a lot of charm. I also have art hung in the kitchen including an oil painting a friend made of me in high school that features the same color orange as the countertops.

My mom used to have a bunch of vintage tea pot lids hanging on the side of a cabinet. They were so charming!

As a Californian, I recoiled when I saw the tiles above the door frame and the champagne corks sitting atop the cabinetry, as my first thought was, “Earthquake!” My second thought was, “Man, I wish I could do that!”

I should’ve been featured! ;) i have a tiny frame of my son’s shopping list back when he was just learning to write. Plus, and please do this too, the creative gentleman who hangs out art suggested framed art on the door that leads from kitchen to laundry. Love it – it’s such a nice pop vs a boring door. Xx

I wish I could add a photo of my kitchen: I collect vintage German kitchen things and hang them up, like tiny cake tins, a salt cellar, a vintage shopping list, a page from my grandma’s handwritten recipe book. I also have tiny paintings of food and vintage spice containers. So fun! I love my kitchen.

We also display cookbooks but use a photo ledge so you can see the entire front cover. I am an avid home baker and cook and my books are my beloved companions. We also have 2 prints from Molly Reeder and I gifted my husband a custom matchbook print from restaurants that are meaningful to our relationship over the past 20 years. I think all the artwork has been inspired by COJ posts!

In our kitchen, we don’t have a lot of open wall space, but the space we do have is occupied by printed stills of Studio Ghibli films involving food and quotes from movies, songs, pop media, etc. about food (e.g., “Sometimes spaghetti likes to be alone.” – Big Night and “If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch you must first invent the universe.” – Carl Sagan). We also sometimes use our island and peninsula side to tape pictures my son draws of food, since we have so little wall space!!

This is the most beautiful house inspiration on the internet. Thank you for showing actual people very minimally curated. Seeing this makes me feel connection and not aspiration, which is the magic of Cup of Jo.

While we were preparing to sell my grandmother’s house, I took a strip of her kitchen wallpaper (very midcentury with oil and vinegar cruets) and framed a piece for myself, my mom, and my godfather. We all have them in our kitchens. I have moved a lot, and once I see her wallpaper, I know I’m home. Speaking of, I am moving next month to a new, small (550 sq ft) apartment in a big city. If anyone has any small living resources, tips for city moves, or how I can hang my art without losing my security deposit, please let me know! I know I can look it up on YouTube, but I appreciate the community’s advice here a lot more.

I have framed photos of each of my kids eating as babies with food all over their faces.

The pear wall inspired me to try my hand at a similar theme wall. So now when I travel, I’m always in the lookout for local artwork featuring coffee, because it seems pretty universal. Now the kitchen has a slow-growing coffee gallery wall and faster-growing mug collection.

I framed a vintage pasta advertising poster that I got on my birthday trip to Italy

In my brother’s old house, there was a cute cooking conversion chart taped in a cupboard that a previous owner had left. When they left that house, my sister-in-law took it, had it framed, and hung it in their new kitchen. I love it.

I love the kid self portraits! We’ve got kids artwork framed throughout our kitchen. Feels important to me that they understand how incredible and important their works are! The 12 year old now moans a bit about his displayed “rainbow” piece (scribbles of different colors scattered across the page, the only way he portrayed a rainbow for years), but it’s with a hint of a smile that lets me know he’s happy it’s a part of our family’s lived space.

For my 50th birthday, my wife gifted me an Heirloomist photo–tagline: turn family heirlooms and keepsakes into modern art–of a collage of teeny and very old B&W photos of my ancestors. It’s 24″ x 30″, the images are masterfully blown up and beyond lovely. I hung it in the kitchen because it’s where I spend the most time, and truly, it brings me to (happy) tears every time I see it. Infinitely more life-giving than when the photos lived in an envelope in a shoe box in a drawer!

We have a small gallery down low by our cat’s food bowl in the kitchen: it features drawings the kids have drawn of her and also a photo of them eating out of bowls on the floor like her. It was my son’s idea and I absolutely love it.

We have a small framed print of a painting of our local Market Basket in our pantry. New Englanders know what I’m talking about… the produce selection and prices are worthy of the honor :) Here’s the artist’s website too: https://www.stephanievecellio.com/shop/p/rainy-night-at-market-basket

Love this article. Friendly heads up that I noticed a couple of typos in the quotes I think? “People now sent me pear photos and postcards and drawings…”, should that be “send”, and “… I made him to give it to me so I could make prints for my sister and myself.”, an extra “to” in there? “I made him to give” should just be “I made him give”?

My kitchen has a wall of food/kitchen themed prints, including, at the top of the wall, my kitchen god, Anthony Bourdain. I also have a series of laminated posters from a bakery from my hometown on the wall near the sink. I also have a collage of a vintage San Francisco postcard and some paper bus transfers that my brother made for me 20+ years ago.

We have framed cookbook covers that make me laugh. “The I Hate to Cook Book” and “The Reluctant Cook” (featuring a happily reclining housewife holding a martini and a cigarette), “Epicure and Charcoal” and my favorite, “Cookery for Men Only” featuring a pair of scissors cutting a carrot.