Draft:Mary Kavanagh

Mary Kavanagh FRSC (born 1965) is a Canadian visual artist and educator. Her work is cross-disciplinary, engaging drawing, video, photography, sculpture and installation. She is a Professor and a Board of Governors Research Chair at the University of Lethbridge and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.

Education and Career
After completing her foundation training in Visual Arts at York University, Kavanagh studied at the University of Guelph, graduating with a Bachelor of Arts - Honours in 1992. She received a Master of Fine Arts from the University of Saskatchewan in 1995, and a Master of Arts in Art History from the University of Western Ontario in 2003.

Since 2000 Kavanagh has taught Art Studio in the Department of Art, Faculty of Fine Arts, at the University of Lethbridge, where she is a Full Professor and Board of Governor's Research Chair, Tier I in Fine Arts. She has served in various administrative capacities including Art Department Chair, and Fine Arts Graduate Program Chair, School of Graduate Studies. She has guest lectured at universities, galleries and museums across Canada and the USA. In 2007 she was Visiting Professor at Hokkai-Gakuen University, Sapporo, Japan, and in 2018 she was appointed Associate Member of the Documentary Media Research Centre (DMRC), School of Image Arts, Toronto Metropolitan University. In 2021 she was elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, Academy of Arts and Humanities.

Work
With a background in art history and critical theory, Kavanagh's art practice has been shaped by the aesthetic and social histories of representation and abstraction, by conceptual art and autoethnography. Her early work was largely concerned with embodiment and memory, with projects focused on the intersection of personal and political narratives.

Her recent projects involve immersion in sites with complex or difficult histories and use research-centric methods such as fieldwork, community engagement, and archival research.

Artist residencies with the Center for Land Use Interpretation, Wendover, Utah, the Santa Fe Art Institute, Santa Fe, New Mexico, and the Canadian Forces Artists' Program, Ottawa, Ontario, have taken her to remote locations including active military bases, weapons testing and research facilities, and sites of mining extraction and remediation. These opportunities have resulted in multi-faceted exhibitions that explore the boundaries of access to publicly held lands, institutions, and data.

Kavanagh has received grants from the Canada Council for the Arts, the Alberta Foundation for the Arts, the Saskatchewan Arts Board, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC). She is an advisory board member of the Atomic Photographers Guild, and international collective of photographers, artists and scholars focused on nuclear representation.

Her work has been critically reviewed in contemporary art journals including: Canadian Art; BorderCrossings; Canadian Military History Journal; ARENA: Critical and Radical Thinking for Australia and the Earth; RACAR/Revue d'art canadienne/Canadian Art Review; Prefix Photo; and Ciel Variable: Art Photo Médias Culture. It has been featured in publications including War Art in Canada: A Critical History by Laura Brandon; Through Post-Atomic Eyes edited by John O’Brian and Claudette Lauzon; The Bomb in the Wilderness: Photography and the Nuclear Era in Canada by John O’Brian. Kavanagh was one of 51 Canadian artists interviewed in Voices: Artists on Art - Contemporary Art 50 years after Sculpture ’67, the project and book conceived and organized by Yvonne Lammerich and Ian Carr-Harris.

Kavanagh was Principal Investigator of a SSHRC Insight Grant for Atomic Tourist: Trinity, a research-creation project (2014-2019) focused on the Trinity test site in New Mexico. Her resultant film, Trinity 3, combines on-site interviews conducted over five years, with archival footage directly related to the 1945 Trinity atomic bomb test, and was presented as part of her solo exhibition, Daughters of Uranium. In his catalogue essay, “Reading the Remains,” writer and cultural anthropologist Peter C. van Wyck states, “Kavanagh’s work draws us toward an understanding of human entanglements with the earth that directs our attention not toward the past in obsessively seeking to place a spike or mark a calendar—the project of a brooding Anthropocene—but toward an understanding of the past as a record or archive of prior media, prior mediations—potentialities, shimmers maybe—that are always and already at work in the present.”

Selected Exhibitions
SOS: A Story of Survival, Part II – The Body, Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery (2023)

Unsettling Sites of War, JHI, Daniels School of Architecture, University of Toronto (2022-2023)

From Remote Stars: Buckminster Fuller, London, and Speculative Futures, Museum London (2022)

Daughters of Uranium, Southern Alberta Art Gallery; Founders’ Gallery, The Military Museums, University of Calgary (2019-2020)

Trinity 3, Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery (2020)

Trinity: Reflections on the Bomb, Albuquerque Museum (2020)

Nuclear Visions, John and June Alcott Gallery, The University of North Carolina (2019)

Voices: artists on art | Contemporary Art 50 Years After Sculpture ’67, Harbourfront Centre Gallery; Al Fanoun Gallery, UAE (2017-2018)

Legacies: Canadian Forces Artists Program, Canadian War Museum (2018)

Future Station: 2015 Alberta Biennial of Contemporary Art, Art Gallery of Alberta (2015)

Group 6: Canadian Forces Artists Program, 2012-13, Diefenbunker: Canada’s Cold War Museum (2015-2016)

Atomic Suite, Art Gallery of Calgary (2012)

Living Utopia and Disaster: 2007 Alberta Biennial of Contemporary Art, Edmonton Art Gallery; Walter Phillips Art Gallery (2007)

Seeking Georgia, Southern Alberta Art Gallery (2006)

ReCollect, A Space Gallery; Galerie La Centrale Powerhouse (2005) polish, Medicine Hat Art Gallery and Museum; Moose Jaw Museum and Art Gallery (2002-2003)

Public Collections
The Alberta Foundation for the Arts

The Saskatchewan Arts Board

Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery

Canadian War Museum