Presentation for Big Botany, 2018
By Mary Kay for Big Botany, Spencer Museum, University of Kansas
Botany was a sacred word in my mother’s vocabulary, and she inadvertently presented a mixed message as she conveyed its importance. Growing up in southern England between the 1st and 2nd world wars she pedaled this countryside, finding plants and flowers for her herbarium. READ MORE
Panel Presentation for KU School of Medicine Artists Open House, 2018
By Mary Kay for KU School of Medicine Open House
In these paintings for the installation “Seasons” I wish to offer the students who attend the KU School of Medicine in Salina, a place of visual meditation on the processes of living and dying. Here is a world of plant and insect, which like a human body is found within a context of constant flux. READ MORE
Crystal Bridges Exhibition to Include Kansas and Missouri Artists, 2014
By Blair Schulman for Huffington Post
Logging over 100,000 miles, and visiting with 1,000 artists, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas announced their selection of 102 artists for State of the Art: Discovering American Art Now, running September 13, 2014-January 19, 2015. READ MORE
Catalog Essay for Kansas City Collection III, 2014
By Dana Self
“Always looking, trying to see, I search for badgers claw, the budding lily, the tooth of a mouse…” – A. Mary Kay.
A. Mary Kay finds a visual world in an ordinary mouse’s tooth, suggesting that she searches for something beyond a simple experience of the natural world. Kay reaches into objects to find essence, truth and a spiritual connection. READ MORE
Naturalism Two Ways, 2008
By Steve Walker for the exhibition, Mary Kay / Rebecca Morales
Though the painters Mary Kay and Rebecca Morales have never met, they democratically shared the walls of Grand Arts this spring. And though few would confuse their work, the artists were revealed to be connected spiritually in ways that both embraced and shunned expectations. READ MORE
Mary Kay/Rebecca Morales at Grand Arts, 2008
By Elisabeth Kirsch for The Kansas City Star
Much of today’s art is awash in refuse, creepy looking organic forms and other detritus — what has been called “the abject.” The abject came to the forefront in the 1980s and ’90s, when AIDS became a worldwide epidemic. When artist Kiki Smith created wax sculptures of men and women with fluids dripping unabashedly from various orifices, READ MORE
Mary Kay and Rebecca Morales show dirty, rotten – and beautiful – work, 2008
By Dana Self for The Pitch
Death, dying, hair, bones — that’s a lot for a two-person exhibition to pack in. But Kansas artist Mary Kay and California artist Rebecca Morales deal with the subjects in ways that are sublime, repellent, chaotic and mostly beautiful. Death, entropy and parasitic invasions are often represented by grotesque, visually disturbing images designed to galvanize. READ MORE
Remembering Today, Longing for Long Ago, Protecting Tomorrow, 2008
By Sue Spaid for the exhibition, Mary Kay & Rebecca Morales
Popular pastimes such as shadow boxes, encased keepsakes, picture lockets, pressed flowers, buried treasures, time capsules, photo albums, scrap books, bulletin boards, and memento mori demonstrate some need to capture yesterday, extend today, freeze moments, or thwart entropy. READ MORE
Nature Remains: Paintings by Mary Kay, 2003
By Mary Kay
These paintings are a meditative continuum, a place of extended looking. Each object has a history, a story: the water lily pressed between the pages of a sketchbook in a boat on Lake Memesagamasing in Canada, the pelvis of a badger — road kill buried and later dug up in the winter, a tiny bird’s wing found one blistering day in the leafy shade of the road. I build the grounds for each Piece READ MORE
From Nature Remains: Paintings by Mary Kay, 2003
By Saralyn Reece Hardy, Salina Art Center Director
How does death accompany life in these paintings? Anger and fear reside in these images, and all that raw feeling that comes from love. The bloodlines of art and the abandoned relics of everyday life shape each page – fixing the remains of birth and destruction, presence and absence with equal force. These paintings of objects from nature record the risk, rage, joy and tenderness that pulse READ MORE
From Histories: An Exhibition of Art and Essays, 1999
By Mary Kay
Desire has always been my motivation for making paintings. From my very earliest experiences with paint; whether it was re-painting my tricycle every spring, spooning out tempera from tins, or seeing painting by adults that had an abundance of paint on the canvas: I always wanted the experience of the physicality, fluidity, and colour of paint. It seemed very obvious. Eventually as a child it became essential to READ MORE
To Fly an Earthen Carpet, 1994
By Mary Kay for The Land Report
I was born in the Chiltern Hills forty miles north of London, chalky escarpments with pockets of clay and flint, covered in woodlands of oak, beech, ash and cherry, pasture interspersed with common land of bracken and brambles. My home town lies in a deep valley through which the Flying Scotsman ran by the side of the Grand Union Canal. It was a small market town steeped in history, READ MORE
Shapes of a Vivid Kingdom: The Paintings of Mary Kay, 1991
By John Hull for the exhibition, What Is Here: Paintings and Drawings by Mary Kay and Frank Shaw
Mary Kay’s large paintings of insects transport the viewer into an alien and disquieting world. Not unlike Gulliver in the land of the Brobdingnagians, the viewer is deposited in the midst of a foreign wilderness, all is surprise and mystery here. At the center, these paintings have something to do with the impossibility of explaining events in the natural world. The jarring impact of these pictures derives from. READ MORE