Kelly (Mary) Papers, 1920-2011, bulk 1964-2004

View only results with digital items
Printable guide [HTML]

Summary

Title:
Mary Kelly papers
Dates:
1920-2011, bulk 1964-2004
Creators:
Kelly, Mary, 1941-
Abstract:
The collection documents the American artist Mary Kelly's projects, social activism, and teaching activities through research files, handwritten notes, ephemera, and audiovisual materials that reflect the ways in which Kelly's socially-engaged projects and pedagogy were intertwined with her commitment to women's liberation and feminist ideals. A substantial portion of the collection also documents the development of Kelly's seminal work, Post-Partum Document (1973-1979), through drafts of her writing, prototypes, and original source materials.
Extent:
89.82 Linear Feet (143 boxes, 3 flatfile folders)
Language:
Collection material is in English, with some Arabic, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Japanese, Norwegian, Polish, Spanish, and Swedish.
Preferred citation:

Mary Kelly papers, 1920-2011, The Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, Accession no. 2017.M.39.

http://hdl.handle.net/10020/archives2017m39

Background

Scope and content:

The Mary Kelly papers document the artist's projects, activism, and teaching activities between the late 1960s and the early part of the twenty-first century. This collection of papers, prototypes, ephemera, and audiovisual materials highlights the ways in which her socially engaged artworks and influential pedagogical practices were intertwined with a deep commitment to women's liberation and feminist ideals.

A large portion of the archive documents the development of Kelly's seminal work Post-Partum Document (1973-1979) through handwritten notes, drafts of her writing, prototypes, and original source materials. Included with these materials is an eight-part distillation of Post-Partum Document that highlights key intellectual, historical, and societal moments that were particularly formative for the work. This distillation, curated by Juli Carson, was exhibited at the Generali Foundation in Vienna in 1998, one of only two exhibitions in which Post-Partum Document was exhibited in its entirety.

The archive also extensively documents Kelly's involvement in the Artists Union and the Women's Workshop, as well as her collaboration with co-members Kay Hunt and Margaret Harrison on Women and Work (1973-1975). The collection also includes materials related to the development of Interim (1984-1989), Gloria Patri (1992), and The Ballad of Kastriot Rexhepi (2001).

Other parts of the archive include personal and professional correspondence, notebooks, printed ephemera, teaching materials, films, sound recordings, and born-digital materials. Course materials, lecture notes, and visiting artist records document Kelly's professional activities at art schools across England and the United States. Additional papers related to Kelly's professional activities include documentation of group exhibitions, grant and fellowship applications, and various versions of her biography and curriculum vitae. Manuscripts, proofs, and correspondence also document the production of publications by and about the artist. Kelly's extensive collection of ephemera includes pamphlets, journals, magazines, newspapers, and exhibition materials related to conceptual art and social movements in the United Kingdom during the 1970s. Audiovisual materials and correspondence are present throughout the archive as they relate to specific projects or events. There is also a section dedicated to correspondence with students, curators, gallerists, and other artists.

Biographical / historical:

American artist Mary Kelly, born in Iowa in 1941, is known for her feminist interventions within the conceptual art-making practices of the 1960s and 1970s. Her works interrogate the socially-constructed, gendered divisions of labor that govern family, professional, and community life and examine the role of medicine, fashion, fiction, and media in shaping perceptions of female identity. Recognized as a foundational figure in the development of both conceptual art and feminist thought, Kelly is also regarded as a key figure in the transmission of post-structuralist and psychoanalytic theory and as a significant arts educator of her generation. Originally trained as a painter, Kelly received a master of arts from the Pius XII Institute in Florence, Italy, in 1965, before moving to Beirut, Lebanon, to teach art at the Lebanese American University. Kelly's time in Beirut, during an era known as Lebanon's Golden Age, exposed her to a Francophone intellectual culture where she was introduced to the psychoanalytic theories of Jacques Lacan, as well as to Marxism—ideas that influenced her thinking throughout her career.

In 1968, Kelly moved to London to begin post-graduate studies at St. Martin's School (now Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, University of the Arts London), where she studied with Richard Long and Gilbert & George and became steeped in the debates around conceptual art. During this time, she continued to study psychoanalysis, Marxism, and other philosophies that were beginning to gain traction in the fields of literature and cinema studies. She became involved in student movements and other political activities, engaging deeply with the new wave of feminist activism that was gaining momentum in the United States and Europe. In her art practice Kelly began to synthesize these diverse interests, and her earliest works after graduate school focused on issues of labor and the impact of gendered divisions of labor on women. These varied interests fueled her extended critique of conceptual art. Specifically, Kelly rejected the abstracted subjectivity prevalent in most conceptual art at the time, which excluded the possibilities of more personal or gendered subjects.

Many of Kelly's projects in the early 1970s were part of collective actions. Kelly was part of a group that attempted to form an Artists Union in the United Kingdom in the early 1970s, and her involvement with the Women's Liberation Workshop included a study group that counted Laura Mulvey and Juliet Mitchell among its members (Mulvey's and Mitchell's early-1970s writings would soon become cornerstones of theoretical feminism in the United Kingdom). As a member of the avant-garde documentary film group, Berwick Street Collective, Kelly worked on Nightcleaners (1975), a film that focused on women—many of whom were working mothers—who supported themselves by cleaning office buildings at night, often under harsh working conditions. Women and Work: A Document on the Division of Labor in Industry (1973-1975), another collaborative project undertaken with Margaret Harrison and Kay Hunt, grew out of a sociological study of more than 150 female workers at a metal box foundry in Bermondsey, a district of southeast London. Through interviews, surveys, data analysis, and archival research, the artists documented pay gaps between men and women, as well as significantly inferior working conditions for female employees. Utilizing a minimalist approach, the installation consisted of charts, punch cards, typed documents, photographs, and film footage.

Kelly's son Kelly Barrie was born in 1973; his early life and development became the subject of Kelly's seminal work, Post-Partum Document (PPD). This project, produced between 1973 and 1979, explored themes similar to those in Nightcleaners and Women and Work, but placed its primary emphasis on gendered social constructions around maternal labor. Documentation I, the first part of PPD, was exhibited at the Institute for Contemporary Arts in London in 1976—the "dirty nappies" featured in the installation caused a scandal. When other portions of the project were displayed at the Museum of Modern Art Oxford in 1977 and the Hayward Gallery in 1978, it was criticized for its intellectual difficulty, especially for its expectation of audience familiarity with psychoanalytic theory, and for its extensive texts. Some feminist authors took issue with Kelly's decision to exclude images of mothers and children in the piece—a tactic that Kelly has generally maintained, rarely including images of women in her work.

Kelly's projects would eventually receive their strongest reception in the United States. American writer Lucy Lippard and American artist Dan Graham saw early exhibitions by Kelly, and became staunch advocates of her work. Access was one of the primary obstacles for the reception of PPD: in addition to being intellectually challenging, the project was extremely large and had never been exhibited in its entirety. The project was published as a book in 1983 (hardcover; paperback, 1985) and in 1984, the whole project was exhibited at the Yale Center for British Art. By this point, the theoretical debates that had swirled throughout the United Kingdom had landed firmly in the United States, and Kelly came to be seen as one of the leading figures in the theoretical turn that pervaded the next generation of conceptual artists in the 1980s, particularly as discussed in the pages of October magazine. Kelly's work was featured prominently in exhibitions such as Difference: On Representation and Sexuality at the New Museum in 1984. In 1989, she joined the faculty of the Whitney Museum's Independent Study Program, and in 1990, the New Museum presented her installation Interim (1984-1989): a six-year, four-part project. that explored further ideas about the construction of female subjectivity. In the meantime, major museums began acquiring parts of PPD, and its components were ultimately split between Canada, the United States, England, Switzerland, and Australia. The complete work has only been exhibited together on two occasions: once at the Generali Foundation in Vienna in 1998, and again at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm in 2010. For the Generali Foundation exhibition, Kelly collaborated with scholar Juli Carson to revisit PPD. Together, they curated an eight-part "distillation" of the PPD archive, highlighting key intellectual, historical, and societal moments that were particularly formative for the work.

Since the 1980s, Kelly has continued to work on ambitious series, often requiring several years of preparation between new projects. The scope of her work has expanded, often focusing on issues of war and social justice. In the 1990s, Kelly developed a method for creating structured accumulations of lint on a domestic laundry dryer filter screen, allowing her to create textual works and, eventually, photographically-inspired images from grids of laundry filters. Humble yet sensuous of surface, the works are directly tied to domestic labor and are notably labor-intensive. The largest pieces require thousands of laundry cycles to complete. Over the last fifteen years, Kelly has returned often to her archive as a source for new work, creating pieces that incorporate materials related to the student movements of the late 1960s and political serials such as 7 Days magazine. From 1996 to 2017, Kelly was a Professor of Art and Critical Theory at the University of California, Los Angeles, where she primarily worked with graduate students in the Master of Fine Arts program, and where she founded the Interdisciplinary Studio Area. In 2017, Kelly was appointed the Judge Widney Professor at the Roski School of Art and Design, University of Southern California.

Acquisition information:
Partial gift of Ray Barrie. Acquired in 2017.
Appraisal information:

Duplicate printed ephemera, unopened and sealed Super 8 film cartridges, and a folder of materials related to Kelly's brother's Minnesota political campaign were not retained with the collection.

Custodial history:

All of the materials in the collection were either created, received, or collected by Kelly, and they remained her property from the time of creation or acquisition until their transfer to the Getty Research Institute in 2017, with a portion of the collection being a partial gift from her husband, Ray Barrie.

Processing information:

The Mary Kelly papers were originally transferred to the repository as two separate acquisitions, one for Post-Partum Document (PPD), and another for the remainder of the artist's papers. The (PPD) acquisition is the basis for the entirety of Series II, and is the largest section of the archive.

Kelly's original folder labels were maintained in quotation marks throughout the finding aid; when items were unidentified or loose, the archivist devised titles without quotation marks.

Most materials in the archive are described at the folder level; however, there are some instances in which materials have been described at the item level. Materials in the Generali section of Series II. Post-Partum Document arrived numbered and labeled by Kelly herself. These materials, featured in the 1998 Post-Partum Document exhibition, correspond almost exactly to the exhibition catalog. The archivist preserved Kelly's order and numbering system. Additionally, bound volumes in Series I and Series II have been cataloged at the item level since most were found unfoldered.

Kelly's intertwined visual and textural projects were also of an interative nature. Heavily annotated manuscripts, biographies, curricula vitae, revisions to drawings, and other project materials are common throughout the archive. There is a strong relationship between Kelly's writing processes and her production of artworks.

The term "handwritten notes" is used in the scope and contents to refer to writing, research, and project planning by Kelly, often on notebook paper. Notes and letters from or to others are referred to as correspondence.

Digital materials were processed by Laura Schroffel in 2022. Files require further processing before access copies can be made available.

Processed by Daryl Bergman under the supervision of Sarah Mackenzie Wade. Daryl Bergman wrote the first draft of the finding aid in 2023; Sarah Mackenzie Wade enhanced and revised portions of the description and finalized the finding aid in 2025.

Arrangement:

The collection is arranged in seven series: Series I. Project files, 1920-2009, undated (bulk 1969-2001); Series II. Post-Partum Document (1973-1979), 1923-2003, undated; Series III. Teaching, conferences, and lectures, 1954-1999, undated; Series IV. Professional papers, 1970-2011; Series V. Correspondence, 1977-2002, undated; Series VI. Ephemera and printed materials, 1960-2003; Series VII. Audiovisual and born-digital materials, 1970, undated.

Physical location:
Request access to the physical materials described in this inventory through the catalog record for this collection. Click here for the access policy.
Rules or conventions:
Describing Archives: A Content Standard
Bibliography:

Adams, Parveen. "The Art of Analysis: Mary Kelly's Interim and the Discourse of the Analyst." In The Emptiness of the Image: Psychoanalysis and Sexual Differences, 71-89. London: Routledge, 1996.

Bhabha, Homi K., Douglas Crimp, and Margaret Iverson. Mary Kelly. London: Phaidon Press Limited, 1997.

Breitwieser, Sabine, ed. Rereading Post-Partum Document. Vienna: Generali Foundation, 1999.

Carson, Juli, Robin Deutsche, Mary Kelly, and Hans Ulrich Obrist. The Voice Remains: Works in Compressed Lint: 1999-2017. New York: Mitchell-Innes and Nash, 2017.

Isaak, Jo Anna. Feminism and Contemporary Art: The Revolutionary Power of Women's Laughter. London: Routledge, 1996.

Kelly, Mary. Imaging Desire. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1996.

Kelly, Mary. Post-Partum Document. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983.

Kelly, Mary. "Projects." Accessed May 1, 2023. https://www.marykellyartist.com/projects-2.

Mastai, Judith, ed. Social Process / Collaborative Action: Mary Kelly 1970-1975. Vancouver: Charles H. Scott Gallery, 1997.

Mitchell-Innes and Nash. "Mary Kelly." Accessed May 1, 2023. https://www.miandn.com/artists/mary-kelly?view=slider#29.

About this collection guide

Collection Guide Author:
Daryl Bergman and Sarah Mackenzie Wade
Date Encoded:
This finding aid was produced using ArchivesSpace on 2025-02-05 08:12:22 -0800 .

Access and use

Restrictions:

Open for use by qualified researchers. Prototypes and biological specimens are fragile and require handling by GRI Conservation staff. Audiovisual and born-digital materials are unavailable until reformatted. Contact the repository for information regarding access.

Terms of access:

Contact Library Reproductions and Permissions.

Preferred citation:

Mary Kelly papers, 1920-2011, The Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, Accession no. 2017.M.39.

http://hdl.handle.net/10020/archives2017m39

Location of this collection:
1200 Getty Center Drive, Suite 1100
Los Angeles, CA 90049-1688, US
Contact:
(310) 440-7390
Website