Artist Biography

Mollie McKinley is an interdisciplinary artist, researcher, and photographer based in the Hudson Valley. Her work creates new perceptual conditions for experiencing the consciousness of ecological entities. Through sculpture, she gives shape to elemental phenomena and their cycles of transformation. This practice draws on her experiences with diagnostic medical imaging, as well as glass techniques like stained glass, blown glass, and neon. McKinley’s has been exhibited widely, including Asya Geisberg Gallery, Pioneer Works, Roundabouts Now, Fridman Gallery, Turley Gallery, Visit, The Sphinx, Ann Street Gallery, ADS Warehouse (Newburgh), Beverly’s, The Contemporary Jewish Museum (San Francisco), NADA Foreland, UrbanGlass, Independent Curators International, The Philosophical Research Society Los Angeles, The Samuel Dorsky Museum at SUNY New Paltz, Anthology Film Archives, and The Museum of Arts and Design.

She is the recipient of recent grants and awards from the Puffin Foundation (2026), Arts & Culture Grant from the New York State Legislature/Arts Mid-Hudson (2025), and the BigCi International Environmental Art Prize, New South Wales, Australia (2025). Residency highlights include Light Work, The Marble House Project, Normalize Talking to the Dead in Lily Dale, the Wassaic Project, and a fellowship in glass at Wheaton Arts. Her work has been the subject of critical texts by Cassie Packard, Emma Fiona Jones, Max Spitzer, among other arts writers. Notable press includes Hyperallergic, Artforum, Vogue, Vice, The Chronogram, WGXC Hudson, Clocktower Radio, New Glass Review (Corning Museum of Glass), the San Francisco Chronicle, the Albany Times-Union, and the Guardian. McKinley holds a B.A. in photography from Bard College, and an MFA in sculpture and dimensional studies from Alfred University. She works as a photographer and educator at the Dia Art Foundation, and has contributed to books such as How-To Kit: Museum Teen Education, published by the Walker Art Center.

Instagram: @mollie_mckinley

In Gratitude and Acknowledgement

Much of my work is made in collaboration with the lands of the Hudson Valley and Catskill Mountains. These landscapes are comprised of complex communities of more-than-human beings: streams, rivers, trees, caves, animals, minerals, microorganisms, elementals, and fungi systems. These lands are the traditional territories of the Lenni-Lenape people, a land called “Lenapehoking.” While I realize that land acknowledgements are a small and incomplete gesture, it is nonetheless important for me to show respect towards the indigenous wisdom systems and sovereign nations that have long existed here. The Lenni-Lenape are the original people and caretakers of this land, and are in continuing relationship with their territory. In the continued presence of Lenape people in their homeland, I affirm the aspiration of the great Lenape Chief Tamanend: that there be harmony between the indigenous people of this land and the descendants of the immigrants to this land, “as long as the rivers and creeks flow, and the sun, moon, and stars shine.”

I’d also like to acknowledge and honor the role of traditional Haudenosaunee lands and its people, known as the Keepers of the Western Door, as I developed my work in relationship to that landscape during 2020-2022.