Mary Kavanagh
Visual Artist
Professor, Department of Art
University of Lethbridge, Lethbridge, Alberta, Canada
Fellow, Academy of the Arts and Humanities, Royal Society of Canada
Member, Royal Canadian Academy of the Arts
Mary Kavanagh is a Canadian visual artist and Professor of Art at the University of Lethbridge. Her sustained examination of nuclear colonialism, militarism, and industrial extraction has been translated through moving image, photographic, drawing, and spatial practices. Her artwork is exhibited in Canada and internationally and responds to conceptual, political, and felt imperatives.
Artist residencies and military embeds have taken her to remote and contested locations across North America, Australia, Europe, and Japan, and into the circumpolar North — places where political histories and surveillance infrastructures accumulate, written on the land, yielding their material evidence to forensic attention. Engaging a distinctly minimalist vocabulary, the work renders that evidence legible.
Her projects include Trinity, an ongoing investigation of the world's first nuclear test site in New Mexico; Daughters of Uranium, an examination of the psycho-social and embodied legacies of the nuclear age, with a publication featuring essays by Peter C. van Wyck and Jayne Wilkinson; Atomic Suite, which documents the military-industrial history of Wendover Airbase and its Cold War aftermath; and Seven Skies of Maralinga, a response to the British nuclear testing program conducted in the South Australian outback between 1952 and 1963, and the long afterlives of its devastation. In Opera Obscura, preoccupations with access, secrecy, classification, and the politics of the public record turn to the library as archive through which knowledge is ordered, preserved, overwritten, and lost.
Twice included in the Alberta Biennial of Contemporary Art (2007, 2015), Kavanagh's work has been the subject of numerous critical reviews, essays, and scholarly publications, including Through Post-Atomic Eyes (McGill-Queen's University Press, 2020), The Bomb in the Wilderness (UBC Press, 2020), and War Art in Canada: A Critical History (Art Canada Institute | Institut de l'art canadien, 2021). As Principal Investigator of a SSHRC Insight Grant focused on the Trinity atomic bomb test site, her research-creation has been supported by the Canada Council for the Arts, the Alberta Foundation for the Arts, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
She is a Board of Governors Research Chair, Tier I in Fine Arts, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, and a Member of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts.
Mary Kavanagh is a Canadian visual artist, educator, and arts administrator. She is a Professor and Board of Governors Research Chair at the University of Lethbridge, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. For nearly thirty years, Kavanagh’s artwork has been exhibited across Canada and internationally.
Artist and research residencies have taken her to remote locations across the globe, including active military bases, weapons testing and research facilities, and sites of mining extraction and remediation. Immersion in places with complex or difficult histories has resulted in multi-faceted exhibitions that explore access to publicly held lands, institutions, and data. A decade-long investigation into the veiled story of nuclear armament resulted in multiple bodies of work including a travelling exhibition with publication, Daughters of Uranium, which encompasses drawing, sculpture, photography, moving image installation, and archival materials. She has recently returned from Maralinga in South Australia, site of the British Nuclear Testing Program (1952-1963). An exhibition and manuscript based on her research findings is in development.
Kavanagh has been the recipient of peer-reviewed 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. She was Principal Investigator of a SSHRC Insight Grant focused on the Trinity atomic bomb test site in New Mexico. Her work has been the subject of over 50 critical reviews and essays, and has been featured in publications including War Art in Canada: A Critical History, Laura Brandon, Art Canada Institute Institut De L’Art Canada, 2021; Through Post-Atomic Eyes, John O’Brian and Claudette Lauzon, eds., McGill-Queens UP, 2020; and The Bomb in the Wilderness: Photography and the Nuclear Era in Canada, John O’Brian, UBC Press, 2020. Mary Kavanagh holds a BA in Art Studio from the University of Guelph, an MA in Art History from Western University, and an MFA from the University of Saskatchewan. In 2007 she was Visiting Professor at Hokkai-Gakuen University in Sapporo, Japan, and in 2018 she was appointed Associate Member of the Documentary Media Research Centre (DMRC), School of Image Arts, Toronto Metropolitan University.
Mary Kavanagh at Maralinga, South Australia, 2024
Photo credit: Merilyn Fairskye