Public-art projects, publishing, and exhibitions that bring artists into conversation.
Canterbury / Creative Director
Pup & Tiger
Exhibitions · Publishing Commissions · Live programme
Pappas-Kelley leads the artistic programme at Pup & Tiger, the independent, queer-led contemporary art organisation he co-founded with Ash Sweeney in Canterbury.
The Exhibitions programme presents work online and in temporary spaces, while Curates develops exhibitions, commissions, and programmes with partners.
Pup & Tiger Press publishes artists’ books and other publications. Editions offers artist prints and objects.
After Dark brings together performance, sound, screenings, readings, and gatherings. Transmissions publishes essays, conversations, fiction, and artist texts.
Presented online through Dennis Cooper and Delere Press, Crossing One brought together artists working across visual, moving-image, text, and sound practices.
Curated by Pappas-Kelley, the exhibition included work by Dennis Cooper, Dawn Woolley, Kier Cooke Sandvik, and Jonathan Armour, among others.
Founder Artist writing · Publishing · Conversations
Pappas-Kelley founded Invert/Extant as an independent press with an emphasis on artist writing. Its Transmissions programme brought together writing, interviews, and artists’ accounts of their own practice.
During lockdown, the programme included contributions from Uta Barth, Assume Vivid Astro Focus, Liam Gillick, Ang Bartram, Bracha Ettinger, and David Blackmore. It connected artistic practice with the conditions in which work was being made.
Alongside this programme, Pappas-Kelley produced Notebook 1: Certainty in Uncertainty (2021), bringing together work in progress, writing, and an extended interview on To Build a House that Never Ceased. Notebook 2: Portents (2022) developed the relationship between drawings, texts, scores, and moving image.
Pappas-Kelley served on Broken Grey Wires’ steering committee in 2020. He also contributed the essay Art in Solvency and Exhaustion: Notes to its archive, exploring exhaustion, mental health, and contemporary art. His work appeared in its 2016 group exhibition Liberate yourself from my vice like grip, presented with Fat Out at Islington Mill.
Pappas-Kelley directed ArtRod from 2001 to 2007. Through the Tacoma nonprofit, he developed exhibition, publishing, and screening programmes alongside Michael S. Lent.
ArtRod brought contemporary art into public settings, print, and screening spaces, connecting local and international practices.
Tollbooth Gallery
A street-side exhibition programme in a converted information kiosk, launched on 31 December 2003. Video loops and paper works were visible around the clock, bringing art into the daily life of the city.
The programme commissioned eight exhibitions a year. Artists combined continuously playing video and sound with paper works and installations on the exterior, developing projects for an audience encountering art in the street. The format invited artists to consider how their work might be altered through public interaction.
Tollbooth Gallery featured in the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles’s classroom curriculum on public art, where students were invited to study the project and design an exhibition space for their own school.
The programme presented work by Wynne Greenwood (Tracy + the Plastics), Vanessa Renwick, Bill Daniel, Alex Schweder, Fionn Meade, Mary Simpson, Ido Fluk, and Anna Oxygen (Cloud Eye Control).
Projects included Greenwood’s Maps to Radical Imagining, Daniel’s Seadrift, Texas, and Schweder’s Split and Jealous Poche. Rising Up brought together Renwick, Donovan Skirvin, and the Celebrate People’s History Project, associated with Josh MacPhee.
Toby Room
Published from 2001 to 2007, Toby Room was conceived as a space for artists to make work in print. Issues combined projects, writing, and interviews, with an artist-in-residence invited to develop a project. Pappas-Kelley served as an editor and publisher.
The publication brought literature into conversation with visual art, film, and music, featuring writers including Robin Hobb and Andrei Codrescu. Artists-in-residence included Thin Ice, Tim Sullivan, Themba Lewis, and Jessica Spring, whose projects gave individual issues their own focus.
Issue 10 documented Tollbooth Gallery’s first year through artist interviews. Conversations with Greenwood, Renwick, Meade, and Rob Millis connect the publication to the exhibitions and the artists’ working methods.
Toby Room 10 / Cover design: Rachel Carns. Publication design: Mary Holste. Image from Pappas-Kelley’s collection. View the record.
Critical Line
ArtRod’s exhibition space at 741 St. Helens, Tacoma, opened on 5 May 2006 with Found Space. Its programme encompassed installation, video, photography, sound, and performance.
Keeping Score brought together Anna Oxygen, Kate Bingaman-Burt, and Joanne Kim; the collection includes material relating to Oxygen’s work with Cloud Eye Control. Found Space featured Matthew Keeney, Kevin Haas, EJ Herczyk, Ann Kendellen, and Ido Fluk. Other exhibitions included Nicholas Nyland and Ellen Ito: New Work.
Don’t Bite the Pavement
An experimental film and video screening series, established in Olympia in 1999 and later part of ArtRod. It presented new and developing work outside traditional gallery settings, touring the West Coast and Canada.
Pappas-Kelley has described how Olympia’s independent music scene inspired the artists to take screenings on the road. He credits the relationships formed through touring with helping to make Toby Room and Tollbooth Gallery possible.
Promotional graphic for Don’t Bite the Pavement. Undated.
In 2005, Pappas-Kelley and Lent received a shared AMOCAT award from the City of Tacoma for their approach to public art, particularly Tollbooth.
Americans for the Arts’ 2005 national public-art conference listed Pappas-Kelley and Lent among its speakers.
