Kendall Pace Art
For more than thirty years, Kendall Pace worked in corporate finance and investment banking, role after role built around finding creative solutions to strategic and financial challenges. It was a kind of creative process, but one bound by logic and structure.
The artist was always there, waiting.
In 1993, she called the art department at the University of Texas at Austin to ask how to apply for a master's in studio art. She was ready to leave investment banking. They told her she would first need an undergraduate degree in studio art. So she hung up the phone and kept going down the finance path to support her family.
But the artist never left. Neither did the other thing in her: a wild, Western kind of spirit that does not give up and does not easily conform.
The turning point came in 2022, in a hospital room. Her son had a collapsed lung and was waiting for surgery. Looking for a way to lift his spirits, Kendall suggested they build a portrait of his idol, Barack Obama, out of aluminum cans, something to make together through a hard stretch.
The portrait sold before it was finished.
What began as a way through a difficult season quietly became a body of work. Today, Kendall builds large-scale portraits of the American West from recycled aluminum cans, working between studios in Austin, Texas, and Durango, Colorado. She came to this work later than many. But reinvention carries a wisdom only years can bring, and it taught her that what we throw away, or set aside as past its prime, is often the most valuable thing in the room.
Artist Statement
I build the icons of the American West from the things we throw away.
Every portrait I make is assembled from aluminum cans, hand-cut, sorted by color, flattened, and layered onto a wooden panel. A single large portrait can hold thousands of pieces from hundreds of cans.
I am drawn to the West by inheritance and by choice. My father's ancestors received a land grant from the Mexican government in 1829 and settled near what is now Houston. I grew up there, spent childhood holidays in Colorado, and have made a personal project of the Southwest's parks, ancestral Indigenous sites, small towns, and back roads.
The West I portray is a place of fused cultures, not a single one: Anglo ranching heritage, Mexican Catholic devotion, the charro tradition, and the Comanche empire that came before them all. It is also a place of contradictions: endurance and extraction, myth and cost, barren land atop hidden oil wealth, the romance of the land and the price of using it.
Aluminum is the perfect material to hold those contradictions. It is discarded, and it is permanent. It is worthless, and it is infinitely valuable. From across a room, my work is a bison, a longhorn, a saint. Up close, it is a barcode, a logo, a torn edge, a record of consumption rebuilt into something worth keeping.
Three decades in finance taught me that value is almost never where people expect to find it. That is what my work is about: looking again at what was set aside, and building it into something that endures.
EXHIBITIONS AND RECOGNITION
2026
Unbridled, A.R. Mitchell Museum of Western Art, Trinidad, Colorado (juried), Blue Buffalo
Western Art Collector, November 2026, Spirit of the Southwest section