Kathy Grove

Grove continues to add works to The Other Series and they continue to impact different audiences. In May 2015, The Civilians, the first theater group in residence at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, used Grove’s image treatment and verbatim discussion of John Singer Sargent’s Madame X painting as the basis for one act of The Way They Live, their drama based art works in the museum’s American Wing.

Tired from the pioneering years of her work neither being readily accepted as a new development in orthodox "photography" nor a variant form of "appropriation art," Grove has increasingly heeded Duchamp’s admonition that the avant-garde artist’s only true recourse was to "go underground." It has been intimated that she has been pursuing certain significant projects that, again like Duchamp, may only come to light with her passing. In recent years she has agreed to show only when her work had been carefully researched and sought out, as in the case of Mia Fineman’s Faking It: Manipulated Photography Before PhotoShop 2012 exhibition and book produced for the Metropolitan Museum of Art and National Gallery of Art. Likewise, she has been very selective in accepting public teaching or lecture invitations. Her work has been discussed in select journals, such as Lawrence Weschler’s Omnivore, or in art history or theory courses taught by photo or feminist scholars such as Anna Chave, of the CUNY Graduate Center and Joanna Isaak of Fordham University.

Among other projects related to Grove’s work, scholars Anna Chave, of the CUNY Graduate Center and Joanna Isaak of Fordham University did a videotaped dialogue, Kathy Grove: An Interview About The Other Series. Filmed and edited by Tricia McLaughlin, in 2001.

In introducing Grove at her 1997 guest lecture at the International Center for Photography, Phil Block, the Director of Programs, stated that "few people can radically alter the history of photography or the history of art but, in her work, Kathy Grove is the rare person who has done both."

Grove curated her own show, Selling Us Ourselves, about the conceits of advertising, for the store front vitrines of the non-profit venue 10-on-8. Working at Oya DeMerli’s SiteOne Digital Studio, Grove collaborated in 1994 with the COLORS magazine graphic designer Tibor Kalman to create "Reagan With Aids," a protest poster, and "What If…", racial-facial makeovers in which celebrities such as Arnold Schwarzenegger, Michael Jackson, the Pope, Spike Lee and others had their races changed.

Expanded versions of The Other Series, done digitally, were the subject of a 1992 show at P.P.O.W., and at the California State University Gallery at Long Beach later the same year. A near-complete presentation of the series was held at the Musee d Elysee, Lausaune, Switzerland, but then traveled to FotoForum, Frankfort in 2002. These works were presented in the form of archival color digital prints that were a cross between original drawings, fine color chromolithographs, and deluxe art history "tipped-in" book plates.

The Other Series: After Janson: Masaccio, an excerpt of the text of H.W. Janson’s History of Art pages about Masaccio, with retouched reproductions of the paintings tipped in by Grove, was reproduced in an April 1990 issue of Artforum as a special artist’s project.

Sympathetic with the research of the Guerilla Girls about how few women were in museum collections and reproduced in art survey books, Grove embarked upon a lifelong project, The Other Series, wherein, using her retouching skills, she removed images of women from iconic paintings and photographs by male artists from Cimabue to Andy Warhol. The first group of these works were altered using professional techniques involving bleach, dyes, and other airbrushing tools. Her color photo prints were shown as a solo exhibition at Pace-MacGill Gallery in 1989. In The Other Series: After Matisse, Grove removes nude model Henriette Darricarrère from a 1926 Henri Matisse painting, leaving nothing but an empty chair.

Upon moving to New York in 1978, Grove initially supported herself by teaching, and doing cartographic drafting and photo-darkroom work. She continued to create topographic wall reliefs of paper, photo montage materials, Masonite, and aluminum painted with acrylic and encaustic, slowly introducing silhouettes of recognizable images. She became involved with the Heresies Women’s Collective, exhibited in group shows, and in 1984, had her first solo show at P.P.OW. Gallery, at its original location in the East Village.

At Wisconsin, from 1974 – 1976, she experimented further with printmaking and photography, as well as paper-making and commercial photo-mechanics. She also did coursework in the Women’s Studies Department. She began "drawing" with a sewing machine and paper punches, producing eccentrically undulating, abstract paper and plastic wall reliefs, with components grommetted together; and 3-D "rayograms" on large sheets of Estar plastic photo paper. She then re-photographed these, printed multiples of the images photo-lithographically, and used them to create subsequent generations of new paper and plastic wall reliefs that were large 3 dimensional abstract photomontage works.

From 1966 to 1970, Grove studied painting, printmaking and photography at the Rhode Island School of Design and its Honors program in Rome, Italy. Upon graduation, she spent a year at Stanley William Hayter’s Atelier 17 in Paris studying color viscosity printing, intaglio techniques, and bookbinding. She then worked at Boston’s Experimental Etching Studio for a year before attending graduate school at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. While in Boston, she supported herself doing mechanical drafting at M.I.T.

Kathy Grove (born 1948) is an American conceptual feminist photographer. As a professional photo retoucher for fashion magazines, Grove became familiar with airbrushing and photo manipulation techniques in that industry. Her work uses those skills to remove subjects from iconic works, or to alter their appearance. Grove wrote that this practice is intended to "portray women as they have been regarded throughout history, invisible and inaudible." Her photo series, The Other Series, includes reproductions of canonical paintings in Western art with the feminine subjects removed.