Mary Reid Kelley


Mary Reid Kelley is an American artist based in upstate New York.

Life

Born in Greenville, SC, Reid Kelley’s black and white videos fuse classical drama, modern literature and contemporary pop culture into observations on gender, class, and urban development. They satirize the promise of progress through dense layering of cultural references ranging from southern church socials and women’s magazines to Borges and Baudelaire. Reid Kelley often works in collaboration with her partner, Patrick Kelley.
Reid Kelley is represented by the galleries Pilar Corrias Gallery in London, Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects in Los Angeles, CA and Fredericks & Freiser in New York, NY.

Work

Writing in 2014, Daniel Belasco, Curator of Exhibitions and Programs at the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art at State University of New York at New Paltz, noted that Kelley
works in the vanguard of a generation that blends the digital and the analog to discourse with the millennia. From 2008 to the present, her astonishing videos have fused live performance, animation, drawing, sculpture, and digital design. Her poignant characters—a nurse, a prostitute, a bohemian, the Minotaur—confront the limits of their historical situations in droll verse. Blending Homer and Cindy Sherman by way of Virginia Woolf, Reid Kelley tells finely wrought narrative epics, rife with wordplay and art historical references, set in World War I, nineteenth-century Paris, and classical antiquity. Working with archival sources and a range of collaborators, especially Patrick Kelley, her husband and an accomplished artist, Reid Kelley invents a poetic mongrel media.
The narrative short films of Mary Reid Kelley often take place during historical moments of social upheaval and war. In her research, Reid Kelley discovered that the female experience of these events was largely lost to the past, eclipsed by a profusion of poetry, literature and art produced by men. In an effort to pull women from the margins of historical records and textbooks, her work centers around female protagonists such as nurses, prostitutes, and factory workers.
Interweaving historical and literary references, euphemisms, and clever puns within the parameters of rhyming verse, her scripts are both humorous and complex. The result is a delightful manipulation of language that satirizes established social structures while disrupting concepts of logic and reason with its nonsensical qualities.
Reid Kelley was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2014.

Solo exhibitions

2012: Performing Histories: Mary Reid Kelley, Salina Art Center, Salina, Kansas
2012: H/Qu: Mary Reid Kelley with Patrick Kelley, Bard Center for Curatorial Studies, Annandale on Hudson, NY
2012: The Syphilis of Sisyphis, The Box at Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio
2013: Sadie, The Saddest Sadist and Priapus Agonistes, Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut
2013: Mary Reid Kelley, Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, Boston, Massachusetts
2013: The Syphilis of Sisyphis, The Contemporary Austin, Austin, Texas
2013: Priapus Agonistes, Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects, Los Angeles
January 22 - April 13, 2014: Mary Reid Kelley: Working Objects and Videos, Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art, State University of New York at New Paltz
July 10 - October 18, 2014: Mary Reid Kelley: Working Objects and Videos, University Art Museum, University at Albany, SUNY, Albany, NY
February 11–27, 2016: The Syphilis of Sisyphis, Rosebud, Waltham, MA