Mary Reid Kelley & Patrick Kelley Biography

Collaborators since 2008, Mary Reid Kelley and Patrick Kelley are best known for their films featuring a signature black-and-white palette, punning wordplay, carefully designed costumes, and custom sets. Through their intuitive filmmaking, Mary and Patrick create intricately crafted parallel universes. With their incisive wit, acrobatic approach to language, and bold cinematic choices, the artists lure us into their darkly humorous narratives and destabilize any familiar sense of reality. Together the couple oversee all aspects of bringing these films to life, as the works feature original verse composed and acted out onscreen by Mary—often in multiple roles—while Patrick acts as cinematographer, director, and post-production editor.

The collaborative work of Mary Reid Kelley and Patrick Kelley has been featured in solo exhibitions at the Hammer Museum, SITE Santa Fe, and the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston. Their most recent exhibition, The Rape of Europa, opened at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in 2021. European solo exhibitions include Tate Liverpool, Kunsthalle Bremen, Museum M, Leuven, Studio Voltaire, and Neuer Kunstverein Wien. Their video work has been reviewed in _The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, W Magazine, La Reppublica, Vogue, The New Yorker, Artforum, Flash Art, Frieze, ARTnews, _and Art in America.

Mary Reid Kelley earned a BA from St. Olaf College and an MFA from Yale University. She is a MacArthur Fellow and has received awards from the American Academy in Rome, the Rema Hort Mann Foundation, and the College Art Association. Major exhibitions include the Baltimore Museum of Art, SITE Santa Fe, the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, and MUDAM, Luxembourg.

Patrick Kelley earned a BA from St. Olaf College and an MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art. He is a recipient of the McKnight Foundation Artist Fellowship and has received awards from the Jerome Foundation and Anderson Ranch Arts Center. His works have shown at the Bibliothèque Publique d’Information-Centre Pompidou, Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, Mykonos Bienniale, Athens International Film and Video Festival, and the Académie de France à Rome.

Mary Reid Kelley and Patrick Kelley are represented by Fredericks & Freiser in New York, Susanne Vielmetter Projects in Los Angeles, and Pilar Corrias in London.

Text courtesy The Fabric Workshop and Museum

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