Kay Whitney, native New Yorker, is a graduate of the School of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts/Tufts University (BFA) and the University of Southern California, Los Angeles (MFA). Her work has been influenced by the serial music of composers Phillip Glass and Steve Reich. Contemporary and historical architecture as well as a range of crude building and improvisational practices are major catalysts for her work. The details of wood construction and fabrication are central to her conceptual vision. The use of textiles (through knotting, wrapping, overlapping, suspending) is a way of articulating and also denying structure; it’s not related to any particular craft processes. Her use of color is focused on the antipodes of light and dark, and what and how they speak. Ultimately, she is invested in the analog; a fierce physical interaction with materials using labor-intensive means.
She’s particularly drawn to nomadic and other intuitive forms of making; her work can be seen as a series of improvisational structures where gesture and lyrical movement are important as content. While geometry is the basis for much of her work, a wilder, less systematic voice also drives her. She focuses on the edges of systems, thresholds where things break down and accidents happen, where the object is in a constant state of flux.
She has exhibited extensively nationally and internationally at Californian venues such as Palos Verdes Art Center; Craft Contemporary; Torrance Art Museum; Newport Harbor Art Museum; California State University, Long Beach; Irvine Fine Arts Center, as well as at the University of Texas, San Antonio; Blue Star San Antonio; University of New Mexico, Albuquerque; Bard College; and Museum Schloss, Holdenstedt, Uelzen, Germany.
Gallery shows have included group and solo exhibitions at Lore Bendgens Gallery, Dusseldorf; Galerie Albrecht, Hamburg; AOA-87, Berlin; Studio Heinz Meyer, Lüneburg; as well as other spaces in the United States and abroad.
In 2022, her work was acquired by the San Antonio Art Museum and is represented in numerous sculpture parks as well as public and private collections across the country.
Reviews of Kay Whitney’s Work
“Although it may be a form of hoarding, repetition is a way to keep everything– to preserve your actions. Without it, I feel that the object is cut off, marooned from the very thing that links it back to me, its performer, director, and producer.”
“As one might expect from her frequent critical essays for Sculpture Magazine, Whitney is keenly attuned to the histories, issues, ideas, and driving forces surrounding contemporary sculpture.”
“The objects I make highlight the ambiguities between hardness and softness, organic and inorganic; they refer to the grid of social order and to the oddly shaped personality of the individual.”
“As a writer, she also takes imagistic leaps that might make you smile.”
“Kay Whitney gestures towards a gravity-defying skyward upsurge with her Skyhook, but its waves of felt ribbons are wrapped around the distinctly organic plywood shapes that form its base– themselves perched upon spiky legs.”
“But all the artists represented in Material eschew any sort of mediumistic purity; each one recontextualizes fiber in a different way, at once questioning its purpose(s) while celebrating its native sensuousness.”