Mary Kelly

Mary Kelly (born 1941, Fort Dodge, Iowa) is an American conceptual artist, feminist, educator, and writer. Kelly has contributed extensively to the discourse of feminism and postmodernism through her large-scale narrative installations and theoretical writings. Kelly's work mediates between conceptual art and the more intimate interests of artists of the 1980s. Her work has been exhibited internationally and she is considered among the most influential contemporary artists working today. Kelly is Judge Widney Professor at the USC Roski School of Art and Design of the University of Southern California. She was previously Professor of Art at the University of California, Los Angeles, where she was Head of Interdisciplinary Studio, an area she initiated for artists engaged in site-specific, collective, and project based work. She was interviewed about her experience teaching at UCLA in Sarah Thornton's Seven Days in the Art World. Work Mary Kelly is known for her project-based work in the form of large-scale narrative installations. Her projects constructed in the 1970s are preoccupied with her experiences of pregnancy and child raising. Antepartum (1973), a single shot of the artist stroking her abdomen as her unborn baby moves, and Post-Partum Document (1973–79), a six part project using both personal and theoretical elements to document the mother-child relationship, were created in the same year. First shown at the ICA in London 1976, Post-Partum Document was made up of six sections and 135 smaller units — accompanied by a number of essays and footnotes — consisting of different objects from Kelly's new born son's life. The work tracks in detail everything that her son did, from eating to expelling and maintains a diary of the artist's thoughts. Post-Partum Document collected used liners from the inside of his cloth diapers, feeding charts, and speech events documented by Kelly. Each documentation is made out of distinct and carefully thought-out materials. Documentation I, for example, incorporated six used liners from Kelly's son's cloth diapers paired with her written text. This unusual subject matter caused outrage and controversy at the debut exhibition because some viewers believed that displaying excrement on used diapers at an art gallery was not appropriate. Documentation III is a transcription of conversations with her child, her internal speech as a mother, and locating the conversation within a specific time interval.