Mary Kelly
Title
Honorary Doctor
Person Type
Honorary
With a career spanning over 4 decades, Mary Kelly is one of the most influential contemporary artists today. Born in 1941, Mary graduated from the College of Saint Teresa in Minnesota, before crossing the Atlantic to study painting in Florence and later attending Central Saint Martins—known at the time as Saint Martin’s School of Art—where she earned a postgraduate certificate in painting.
Not long after graduating, Mary had her first solo show in 1976 at the London Institute of Contemporary Art, where she exhibited her career-defining work Post-Partum Document. The work is now considered one of the most important pieces of feminist conceptual art of the 20th century, exploring the socio-political intersections of identity, motherhood, and feminism. In 1985, Mary became the Artist-in-residence at Kettle’s Yard and Murray Edwards College, where she began work on her large-scale series Interim. She continued to develop the series and exhibited the complete work at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York in 1990.
Her work has been exhibited internationally, including a retrospective at the Whitworth Art Gallery in Manchester, and major surveys at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm and the Centre for Contemporary Art in Warsaw. She has also participated in prestigious exhibitions such as the Whitney Biennial, the Biennale of Sydney, and Documenta 12. She is a recipient of the Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship and honorary doctorates from Wolverhampton University, Lund University and the University of the Arts Helsinki.
During her tenure as a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, she established the Interdisciplinary Studio program in 1997—pioneering an innovative approach to arts education and research. She currently serves as Judge Widney Professor at the Roski School of Art and Design at the University of Southern California.