NEW MARY KELLY
MARY KELLY
Coming of age during the Vietnam War, the Civil Rights Movement, and the dawn of feminism, as a young artist Mary Kelly was galvanized by the intricate political issues that characterized the era. Focused on systems of thinking as they relate to gender, psychology, equality, and collective trauma, Kelly’s evolution as an artist and theorist began in the 1970s with rigorous and boundary-breaking installations focused on intimacy, activism, and cultural and social experimentation. Renown for captivating the viewer in a continuum of concept-driven imagery, text, and media, her large-scale projects have helped to redefine subject matter, transform world politics into the personal, and maintain a long-standing exploration of feminist theory, gender economics, and human rights. Her practice, now in its fifth decade, has become central to the postmodern dialectic.
Based in Los Angeles, Mary Kelly was born in Fort Dodge, Iowa in 1941 and raised in Minnesota. Anxious to engage the world, after college she studied painting in Florence, Italy, and soon accepted a job teaching studio art in Beirut, where she remained through Lebanon’s Six-Day War in 1967. The experience was transformative, providing a glimpse of the precariousness of life. The following year she moved to London, a hotbed of leftist politics, student uprisings, and contemporary art. Thriving at Saint Martin’s School of Art, Kelly participated in non-traditional art forms, joined a commune, met her future husband, the artist Ray Barrie, and in 1973, became pregnant. During this time, she would embark on one of her most seminal works, Post-Partum Document, 1973-79, a project tracing her son’s first six years through archival writings, recordings, scribbles, and soiled diapers. Focused on the psychological, physical, and emotional relationship between mother and child, it turned out the politics of motherhood were even too radical for some early proponents of the women’s movement. Still, this marks the advent of Kelly’s mature work in which major projects are intimate yet extensive in scale, cerebral yet deeply human, and conceptual yet accessible.
Seeking a way to humanize social issues and global trauma, while listening to a grim broadcast on South Africa’s Apartheid in 1999, she stumbled upon the lint in her dryer screen. It could be peeled off, configured, or revitalized in intaglio printmaking, making it a viable studio asset. This material - free, diaphanous, plentiful - would become a staple in her methodology. Indefatigable, brilliant, unapologetic, earlier this year Kelly premiered Lacunae, 2023, a new, multi-paneled work included in the 81st edition of the Whitney Biennial, Even Better Than the Real Thing, 2024, in New York City.
Mary Kelly’s art is held in prestigious collections worldwide including the Arts Council of Great Britain; The Tate Britain, London; The Tate Modern, London; Victoria and Albert Museum; New Hall, Cambridge Museum, Cambridge; Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester; Zabludowicz Collection, London; all in the UK; Australian National Gallery, Australia; Generali Foundation, Vienna, Austria; Burger Collection; Kunsthaus Zurich, both in Switzerland; Art Gallery of Toronto; Mackenzie Art Gallery, Regina; Vancouver Art Gallery, British Columbia, all in Canada; Center for Contemporary Art, Ujazdowski Castle, Warsaw; Museum Sztuki, Łódź; both in Poland; Centre Pompidou Foundation, Paris, France; Helsinki City Art Museum, Finland; Moderna Musset, Stockholm, Sweden;, Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, New Zealand; in the U.S.: Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH; Colorado University Art Museum, Boulder, CO; Hammer Museum, UCLA, Los Angeles, CA; Hessel Museum of Art, Bard College, NY; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA; New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, NY; Norton Family Foundation, Santa Monica, CA; Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach, CA; Rachofsky House, Dallas, TX; Spencer Museum of Art, Lawrence, KS; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; Progressive Corporation; and Museum of Modern Art, New York City, NY; National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.; and The Weil, Gotshal, and Manges Collection.
In 2024, Mary Kelly’s Concentric Pedagogy: Selected Writings, was released by Bloomsbury Publishing. Selected and introduced by Juli Carson, this book presents a collection of essential essays, interviews, and never-before published archival materials that trace Kelly’s development from 1980-2017.
She has received multiple awards including The Creative Capital Award, 2024; Honorary Doctorate, Fine Arts, University of the Arts, Helsinki, Finland, 2018; Honorary Doctorate, Faculty of Fine and Performing Arts, Lund University, Sweden, 2017; John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, 2015; Anonymous Was a Woman Award, 2012; The Distinguished Artists’ Interviews, College Art Association, 2012; Honorary Doctor of Arts, University of Wolverhampton, UK, 2004; Council on Research Award, University of California, Los Angeles, 2001; Council on Research Award, University of California, Los Angeles,1998; National Endowment for the Arts Visual Arts Fellowship, 1987; New Hall, Cambridge University, Artist-in-Residence Award, 1985; Greater London Arts Association Visual Arts Award, UK, 1980; Hans Jorgen Muller Award, Europa 79, Stuttgart, Germany, 1979; Lina Garnade Memorial Foundation Award, 1978; Arts Council of Great Britain Visual Arts Award, 1977; and the Greater London Arts Association Fellowship, UK, 1973.
Mary Kelly was filmed and interviewed on November 17, 2022 at her home and studio in Los Angeles, California.
“Even from the beginning with Post-Partum Document, there’s what I came to call the narrativization of space. I thought of the project filmically.”
“As far as my early training as a painter, I think that’s very intimately related to cinema. I always think about this when I’m talking to Dan Graham. People are like, ‘All the sculptors want to be architects, and all the painters want to be filmmakers.’ And so, there’s a certain kind of sensibility that has to do with dimension.”
“We embarked on this documentary film about the whole process of unionization… it was important to recognize that it was a reflection on the historical moment, if you like, this intersection of the women’s issues and the trade union issues….I was pregnant at the time, and I thought, ‘I’m going to really look at what this social sexual division of labor is about.’”
“I think the most important thing for me was the privilege of coming of age in the ‘60s, which was a highly kind of hopeful, as well as disruptive, moment that still believed in the heroic avant-garde, in experimentation and questions that were inspired by social issues.”
“When I was studying in Florence, we would study the Masaccios with the curator of the Uffizi at that time. And we would do them inch by inch. One day this far, the next day here, that close of a reading. This absolutely stayed with me. And over the years I developed that as my approach to critique and teaching. We do a very, very close, very slow reading of the work where the artist doesn’t speak.”
