Cynthia Mulcahy

Installation Images

Selected Works

Cynthia Mulcahy
White-faced Ibis / Plegadis chihi, Trinity River, Dallas from The Birds of America Project (Climate-endangered and Climate-threatened Remix), 2020
Watercolor and graphite on Arches paper
10 1/2h x 10 1/2w inches
Cynthia Mulcahy
Roseate Spoonbill / Platalea ajaja (After JJ) from The Birds of America Project (Climate-endangered and Climate-threatened Remix), 2020
Watercolor and graphite on Arches paper
10 1/2h x 10 1/2w inches
Cynthia Mulcahy
White Ibis / Eudocimus albus, Trinity River, Dallas, 2020
Watercolor and graphite on Arches paper
10 1/2h x 10 1/2w in
Cynthia Mulcahy
Tank Study, from the War Garden series, 2018
Watercolor and pencil on Arches paper
25 1/2h x 33w inches
Cynthia Mulcahy
War Garden, 2018
Watercolor, pencil and gouache on Arches paper
12 1/2h x 21 1/4w inches

Biography

Cynthia Mulcahy is a Dallas-based conceptual artist and independent curator. After working as a gallerist for over ten years, in 2007, she decided to leave the gallery to focus on her independent curatorial and artistic practice. Mulcahy’s research-based works range from large-scale participatory actions to delicate watercolors. Recently, for her War Garden body of work, she researched and documented the use of biological terminology in US military operations. The resulting delicate watercolors and installations presented alternative ways of understanding language, nature, and its role in US history. Meanwhile, with participatory public artworks taking forms as diverse as a community square dance, musical performances, or farming as street theater, Mulcahy explores the history of place and activates public space. In doing so, she questions the divisions between various forms of art-related practice and promotes the concept and practice of art as activism. Her work is often collaborative – made with other arts professionals but also with the communities to which her projects pertain.

Mulcahy’s work has received broad critical acclaim, appearing in The Dallas Morning News, D Magazine, The New York Times, The New Yorker, and New York Magazine. Her recent projects include War Garden, United States 1917 – 2017 (2017); A Field Guide to Flora and Fauna of Southern Dallas (2017); Performance as Gesture: Songs for a City Park (Japanese Garden, Kidd Springs Park, Dallas, 2015); Engines of War, an exhibition that examined the United States wars in Iraq and Afghanistan co-curated with Charles Dee Mitchell (NYC, 2013); Seventeen Hundred Seeds, a site-specific collaboration with Robert Hamilton in a vacant city block (Dallas, 2012); and Square Dance: A Community Project, co-organized with Leila Grothe at the Trinity River Audubon Center (Dallas, 2011). Mulcahy’s project, Square Dance, was the recipient of an Idea Fund Grant from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.

Exhibitions

On-site and Individual Works

Cynthia Mulcahy

War Garden, United States 1917 – 2017
Talley Dunn Gallery
June 16 – July 28, 2018

Off-site

Cynthia Mulcahy

A Field Guide to Flora and Fauna of Southern Dallas
The Dallas History and Archive Division of The Dallas Public Library
October 27, 2018 – January 31, 2019

Videos

Press

D Magazine

“A Field Guide to Dallas”
2020

D Magazine

“How a Community Square Dance Becomes Art” 
by Peter Simek
November 10, 2011

Dallas Morning News

“How a Dallas artist is using watercolor fauna and flora, sculpture to examine a century of war” 
by Jeremy Hallock
July 2018

New York Times

‘Engines of War’
by Holland Cotter
April 25, 2013

Glasstire

“Seventeen Hundred Seeds: Cultivating Community as Art” 
by Margaret Meehan
June 2, 2012