Reception
Saturday, April 27
11am–2pm
McDermott Learning Center, The Wildflower Center
On View
9am-5pm, Daily
Exception: Not accessible when classes are taking place in the building
In much of her recent work, McCarthy has considered the histories of women, including Nina De Villard and Mary Todd Lincoln, teasing out complicated narratives in order to bring the past and present into dialogue. The works in SUCH LONELY COUNTRY evolved from close readings of the early 20th-century botanist Mary Sophie Young’s diaries. Young's eloquent passages about getting lost, solitude, and the vast landscape of Texas resonated with McCarthy, mirroring her own experience during her residency in Austin. Several other sculptures, embedded with videos, build off of these ideas with forms and narratives related to human procreation, productivity and plant life.
Katy McCarthy was born in California and lives in Austin and Brooklyn. She received her MFA from Hunter College in 2017. Her work has been exhibited at Cluster Gallery; Sleep Center Gallery, New York; Flux Factory, LIC; Santa Barbara Contemporary Art Museum; Santa Barbara Museum of Art; Tiger Strike Asteroid, Los Angeles; Maxon Mills; and the Military Museum in Belgrade. Her videos have screened at NURTUREart’s 2018 Single Channel: Video Art Festival, CUNY Video Festival, and Queens Boulevard Film Festival. She has been an artist-in-residence at SOHO20 Residency Lab; Grin City, Iowa; The Wassaic Project in Wassaic, NY and currently, the St. Elmo Arts Residency at the University of Texas at Austin.
The St. Elmo Arts Residency is a joint project of the Department of Art and Art History and the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center at The University of Texas at Austin that offers one fellowship each academic year to a newly minted MFA artist in painting, drawing, print, photo, sculpture or multimedia.