Gay Fay Kelly Memorial Art Exhibit

Sat Oct 15 2022 at 04:00 pm

Prizer Arts & Letters | Austin

Prizer Arts & Letters
Publisher/HostPrizer Arts & Letters
Gay Fay Kelly Memorial Art Exhibit
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Join us for a memorial exhibit of artist and gallerist, Gay Fay Kelly, who passed away last year. Gay, a catalyst and supporter of Austin art’s community, was of particular importance to Prizer Arts & Letters. She helped to launch Prizer in 2012, curating shows here as "Gay Fay Kelly at Prizer" and providing insight on how to successfully build and operate a gallery.

We are grateful for all the time, care and expertise she provided us, and we are honored to show selected pieces from her own extensive body of work.

Opening Reception Timeline:
-4:00pm: Doors Open
-5pm to 6pm: Memorial with remembrances of Gay (all are welcome to participate)
-6pm to 9pm: Art reception with light appetizers, drinks & music

A life-long artist, Gay’s catalog of consists of more than a thousand paintings, drawings, prints, and three-dimensional pieces, split roughly 50/50 between representational and abstract styles. In the 1980s her figurative work was moderately well known in Texas artistic circles through museum and gallery shows. Many works in those shows were big, bravura canvases in her immediately recognizable expressionistic style. For the show, we have selected over 40 pieces that display Gay’s amazing breadth of talent.

This event will also serve as the launch for the book, "Gay Fay: The Brooklyn Fuji Sketchbooks," written and compiled by Gay Fay Kelly’s husband, Dan Kelly, and designed by Austin artist Scott Rolfe. It includes drawings and collages from the sketchbooks that Gay contributed to the Brooklyn Art Library between 2012 and 2021. Gay considered her Fuji series the locus of her abstract style. The pieces in the book are intimate and reflective, chamber-music complements to her big orchestral canvases.

About the artist: Gay Fay was a seventh-generation Texan, born in Baytown in 1949. She had a tough, scientific mind. In 1969 she was thriving as a third-year geochemistry major at Rice University when John and Dominique de Menil handed the school a fully formed art department and brought in an epoch-making exhibition from MoMA, The Machine at the End of the Mechanical Age. The show changed Gay’s life. She switched to art and art history, graduated with honors in 1972, and was a working artist the rest of her life.

Pictured: self-portrait by Gay Fay Kelly (left) and a detail from one of Gay Fay Kelly's Fuji pieces
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Event Venue & Nearby Stays

Prizer Arts & Letters, 2023 E Cesar Chavez St,Austin,TX,United States

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