Joan Marie Kelly
Joan M. Kelly is Irish American, born on the east coast of the
USA. She attended Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore Magna Cum
laude with a BFA in Painting. She received her MFA in Painting at Western
Connecticut State, and immediately took a position as Assistant Professor at
Nanyang Technological University School of Art Design and Media, in Singapore.
Kelly completed several public art pieces in the USA and in 1997 founded and
directed an art studio for adults with disabilities. This studio is still
successful today. Kelly's introduction to Asia began in 1986 when she traveled
to Indonesia carrying the pictures, letters from Indonesia foreign workers in
New York to their families on Java. Presently, this thread has continued
through painted portraits of people on the fringes of society in Asia. "Joan
Kelly operates in "zones of contact", a theme elaborated in the 2006 Sydney
Biennale: places where competing narratives of power compete, where silences
speak to unwritten histories. If the Nanyang artists (Lim Hak Tai, Georgette
Chen, Chen Wen Hsi, Chen Chong Swee, Liu Kang and Cheong Soo Pieng) revitalized
the human form through the exotic of Southeast Asian landscape, Kelly reinvents
the body through the environment of these zones: be it the foreign worker
chattels of Little India, the brothels of Calcutta, or the factory towns of the
Shenzen Economic Zone. These zones mark the intersection of the grand narrative
of globalization and progress with those of the lived reality at the bottom of
the pyramid. This is the landscape to the art of Joan Kelly." ( Art critic,
Paul Khoo, Singapore)
