Home > News > Mary Kelly Accepts Position as Chair of UCLA's Department of Art

Mary Kelly Accepts Position as Chair of UCLA's Department of Art

Carolyn Campbell (ccampbel@arts.ucla.edu) (310) 825-6540
For Immediate Use Thursday, October 24, 1996.

Artist and theorist Mary Kelly has been recruited as the new chair of the Department of Art in the UCLA School of the Arts and Architecture. Her acceptance was announced by Dean Daniel Neuman.

Kelly, a visiting professor in the art department, will succeed Henry T. Hopkins, who became full-time director of the UCLA at the Armand Hammer Museum of Art and Cultural Center last year.

"Mary Kelly is a prominent artist, academician and author, and we welcome her to the school as the ideal professional to lead what is considered one of the nation’s top art faculty. Her extensive experience as an educator and artist will certainly enrich the students’ lives as well," Neuman said.

Kelly came to UCLA from her position as director of studios in the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Independent Study Program in New York. Her background includes study in Florence, Italy, where she was awarded a scholarship in 1963. After completing an M.A. in 1965, she taught at the American University of Beirut until 1968, when she received a grant to continue postgraduate study at St. Martin’s School of Art in London.

During the ’70s she began her first extended project, "Post-Partum Document," which was shown at the Institute of Contemporary Art in London. She began her second project, "Interim," in 1983 and completed "Part I: Corpus" during her residency at Cambridge University in 1985-86. In 1987 and ’89, when she was a recipient of a major visual arts award from the National Endowment for the Arts, she completed "Part II: Pecunia." In 1990, the complete work, including "Part III: Historia" and "Part IV: Potestas," was exhibited at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York. The project was published in book form and selected for inclusion in the 1991 Whitney Biennial.

Kelly taught studio art at the University of London for a decade before joining the faculty at the California Institute of the Arts in 1987. In 1989 she moved to New York to join the Whitney. She was appointed Regents Lecturer in Art and Art History at UCLA during the 1994-95 academic year.

A retrospective exhibition of Kelly’s earlier work toured Sweden, Norway and Finland in 1994 and 1995. This work recently was shown in a historical survey of the 1970s at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art and was included in "Nowhere" at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark as well as the "Sexual Politics" exhibition at the UCLA at the Armand Hammer Museum of Art and Cultural Center. A collection of essays, "Imaging Desire," is forthcoming from MIT Press, and a monograph of her artwork will be published by Phaidon Press in 1997.

The Department of Art offers professional art training emphasizing experimentation and encouraging students to draw from many disciplines in their creative process. Bachelor’s and M.F.A. degrees are offered in painting/drawing, new genres, photography, ceramics and sculpture.

Department of Art faculty: Chris Burden, Barbara Drucker, Roger Herman, Henry Hopkins, Paul McCarthy, Lari Pittman, Charles Ray, Nancy Rubins, Adrian Saxe, James Welling and Patty Wickman.

Lecturers and visiting faculty: John Baldessari, Judie Bamber, Barbara Bloom, Dennis Cooper, Meg Cranston, Linda Day, Kim Dingle, Dana Duff, Chris Finley, Morgan Fisher, Phyllis Green, Jim Isherman, Joan Jonas, Anne Marie Karlsen, Cindy Kolodziejski, Gary Lang, Andrea Liss, Sharon Lockheart, John Mason, T. Kelly Mason, Daniel McCleary, John Miller, Renee Petropoulos, Erika Rothenberg, Ralph Fugoff, Allan Ruppersberg, Don Suggs, Mary Weatherford, Benjamin Weissman and Christopher Williams.

-UCLA- CCCE441

Contact: Carolyn Campbell
Phone: (310) 825-6540
Email: ccampbel@arts.ucla.edu