Artist Spotlight: November, 2025
Kitty Wales
Wales’ piece, Requiem, hangs from the museum ceiling in the Phoenix Gallery.
Tell us a little about your background.
I grew up in the town of Southboro, Massachusetts on the campus of a boy’s school where my father taught math and my mother worked in the library. With two older brothers and many boy cousins, I was the first girl born in my generation. Summers were spent with my family in a renovated 100-year-old horse barn on an island in Maine. Days were shared there with my brothers, making forts in the woods, digging for clams, and swimming in the ocean.
I studied sculpture and drawing at Boston University, moved to Arizona for graduate school, and then taught there for several years. My first job after returning to the east coast was at the Worcester Art Museum, where I taught youth classes in sculpture, drawing, and comics. I was later hired at the collegiate level in and around New England, and then taught in the sculpture department at Boston University for over 25 years.
When did you know you were an artist?
As a kid I was always drawing things and arranging rock structures in the abandoned granite quarries on the island. Later, in art rooms at school, I painted and explored different mediums, but it wasn’t until college that I decided to pursue the arts professionally.
Was there a pivotal moment for you?
During freshman year at Boston University, I took an elective drawing class in the art department. Phyllis Berman was the teacher, and that class became pivotal to my decision to focus on art. She taught me the technical skills of drawing from direct observation in its many forms, and I never looked back. Later I was encouraged by my teacher and mentor Nick Edmunds to major in sculpture, which I combined with drawing, art education, and anatomy.
Where do you find inspiration?
My projects are often inspired by research and are usually installation and site-specific based. In the past, an interest in a particular animal or grouping of animals might lead to applying for field research grants to observe them in their natural habitat. Longhorn cattle in Texas, feral goats on Rhum Island off Scotland, and Caribbean Reef Sharks are subjects I’ve studied in the past. Reflecting on the experience, and my documentation, leads to drawing in the studio. The process may go through many transformations along the way, but material choices always help jumpstart things.
What is your favorite medium?
In sculpture, discarded objects have most always been what I choose to work with. Salvaged from domestic life, they retain recognizable histories and purposes I like to explore. I’ve collected tire treads, domestic fencing, or household appliances in scrap yards and transfer stations. Chairs, other broken furniture, and old suitcases come from friends, swap shops, and dumpsters. Accumulating enough material to create sculptural settings and finding ways to work with them are necessary but time-consuming first steps to each project.
Can you describe your process?
An eventual working-out occurs as I puzzle through each part of building up 3-Dimensional forms. The work moves forward or backward when I am at the edges of not-knowing and continues to evolve like that throughout the process of making. When trouble-shooting, I might switch to different activities in and out of the studio. Changing perspective from 3D to 2D helps to sketch out shifting ideas. Changing how a work sits in a space; whether on the wall, or the floor, or hanging from the ceiling is another way to adjust direction. During parts of every day I also try to get out of the chaos of the work space. Going for a long walk or swimming in the ocean can bring some clarity to problem solving.
Is there anything else you’d like us to know about your work?
The narrative theme of the work in my Traces exhibit began with research in 2019 of Mayan Codices at the Anthropology Museum in Mexico City. Those painted manuscripts document bloodlines, history, science, and sacred rituals of Mesoamerican cultures. They display a colorful pictorial language activated by symbols and characters within tight frameworks. I adapted that format of recorded history to story board stages of these wall assemblages, as well as some of their color palette.
During construction of these wall works, I placed sculptures of domestic objects within their crevices and niches. The vessels were chosen for their shape and gesture, but also as historical icons reanimating the memories they hold. The objects in their placements become domestic stages for the passage of time.
Read about other artists on the Meet the Artists page.
Kitty Wales
Kitty Wales, Requiem
