Kelly Greene is a multi-media artist whose work includes painting,
sculpture, installation, and photo montage. She is of Kanien’kehaka (Mohawk), Onenio’te’a:ka (Oneida) and European (Sicilian)
ancestry, a member of the Six Nations of the Grand River Territory, and a
descendant of Turtle Clan.
Kelly has lived in
London, Ontario since 1989, where she was honoured to give birth and raise her
two amazing children, and where she still resides with her husband. She
obtained a BFA from the University of Western Ontario after beginning her
visual art studies at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, where she
moved with her family when she was a child.
She has exhibited in Canada and the United States
for over thirty years in solo and group exhibits, primarily at the Woodland
Cultural Centre in Brantford, Ontario but also Banff, Alberta; Vancouver, B.C.;
Montreal, Quebec; Ottawa, Thunder Bay, Toronto, and London, Ontario; Santa Fe,
New Mexico, and Howes Cave, New York. Her work is in several public and private
collections, and in 2012 and 2015 she was commissioned to complete two
permanent outdoor installations at the Woodland Cultural Centre. She has been
awarded grants from the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council
and was most recently awarded the first Indigenous Artist in Residence at
Western University in 2021.
Her
art focuses primarily on environmental, Haudenosaunee (People of the Longhouse,
as Six Nations’ members refer to ourselves), and auto-biographical topics.
Recognizing the impact colonization has had on our Earth and the First People
who have always lived on the land now known as Canada, Greene specifically
refers to the Haldimand Treaty granted to the people of Six Nations, as well as
the Mohawk Institute Residential School, or “Mush Hole”, where her beautiful
Grandma attended in the 1920’s. Another concern is the current plight of bees,
vanishing due to human activity and overpopulation. The ever-alarming condition
of our planet has inspired Greene to create works that represent our Mother
Earth as human, appealing to our species' egocentricity, hoping empathy will be
instilled and respect given so future generations will continue to be
revived and thrive.