Mary Kavanagh
Professor, Board of Governors Research Chair (Tier I)
Specialty
Drawing, Interdisciplinary Art Studio
Contact
About
Mary Kavanagh is a visual artist, Professor of Art, and Board of Governors Research Chair (Tier I in Fine Arts) at the University of Lethbridge. For three decades, she has developed projects through fieldwork, residencies, archival research, and interdisciplinary collaboration, often through sustained engagement with remote and restricted sites. Her work has been presented in solo and group exhibitions across Canada and internationally.
Working with photography, moving image, drawing, and installation, Kavanagh investigates sites shaped by nuclear colonialism, militarization, and industrial extraction. Her practice engages collecting, memory, inscription, and visibility, approaching the archive as material evidence bound to histories and territories. This research is articulated through formally restrained, spatial, and sensory works. Major projects include Daughters of Uranium, Seven Skies of Maralinga, Trinity, Track of Interest, and Atomic Suite. In her recent installation Opera Obscura, two thousand blackened books give form to the accelerating loss of the material record.
Kavanagh's research has been supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, Canada Council for the Arts, and the Alberta Foundation for the Arts. As Principal Investigator of a SSHRC Insight Grant, she undertook sustained fieldwork at the Trinity atomic bomb test site in New Mexico for an ongoing project examining atomic aftermath. Critical writing on Kavanagh's work has been published in specialized art publications and scholarly journals including Esse, Arena, Ciel variable, Canadian Art, Border Crossings, and Canadian Military History. Her work has also been discussed in books and exhibition catalogues such as War Art in Canada: A Critical History (Art Canada Institute, 2021), Through Post-Atomic Eyes (McGill-Queen's University Press, 2020), The Bomb in the Wilderness: Photography and the Nuclear Era in Canada (UBC Press, 2020), Voices: artists on art | 2017–1967 (TfT Works, 2020), and the monograph Mary Kavanagh | Daughters of Uranium (SAAG; Founders' Gallery; Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery, 2020).
Kavanagh teaches in the areas of drawing and interdisciplinary art studio at the undergraduate and graduate levels. Her teaching emphasizes sustained observation, material experimentation, critical inquiry, and the development of independent artistic practices. She has supervised and mentored students working across diverse media and research methodologies, situating studio practice in relation to contemporary art and visual culture.
Across her academic career, Kavanagh has contributed extensively to departmental, faculty, and university governance, including two terms as Chair of the Department of Art and two consecutive terms as Chair of the MFA/MMus Program Committee in the School of Graduate Studies. Beyond the University, she has contributed to the wider cultural sector through jury work, professional assessment, advisory roles, and support for artists, galleries, and arts organizations.
Kavanagh holds a BA Honours in Fine Art from the University of Guelph, an MFA in Art Studio from the University of Saskatchewan, and an MA in Art History from the University of Western Ontario. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada's Academy of Arts and Humanities and a Member of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts.
