Kendall Pace
Large-scale portraits of the American West from thousands of recycled aluminum cans. Originals and commissions.
Austin, Texas — Western Colorado
About the Artist
For more than thirty years, Kendall Pace joyfully 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 masters in studio art. She was ready - 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 pivotal moment arrived in 2022, in a hospital room. A son was diagnosed with a collapsed lung and was awaiting surgery. Looking for a way to lift his spirits and to make something together, Kendall suggested they built a portrait of Barack Obama, an idol of his, side by side, from aluminum cans. It was meant as a way to co-create, to bond, to lift his spirits through a difficult stretch. She ended up doing to portrait alone, but it still brought them closer.
Then the portrait sold before it was finished.
What began as a way to move through a harder season slowly, quietly became a body of work. Today, Kendall builds large-scale portraits of the American West entirely from recycled aluminum cans. She came to this work later than many. But reinvention carries a wisdom that 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 and hundreds of cans.
I am drawn to the West by inheritance and by choice. My ancestors on my father's side received a land grant from the Mexican government in 1829 and settled in Montgomery County, near Houston; I still have relatives across Texas today. I grew up in Houston, spent many childhood holidays in Colorado, and have made a personal project of visiting the iconic places of the American Southwest — the national and state parks, the ancestral Indigenous sites, the small towns and back roads. The desert, the mountains, and the people who make their lives there, past and present, fascinate and inspire me. The West is a place of contradictions: endurance and extraction, myth and cost, revival next to decay, seemingly 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 wild horse. Up close, it is a barcode, a logo, a design — a record of consumption rebuilt into something worth keeping.
I came to this work late, after three decades in finance, a career and a personal life spent learning where value hides, where order rules (or doesn't). 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.
