Kendall Pace  

Kendall Pace is a Texas-born artist based between Austin and Western Colorado. Working at the intersection of portraiture and assemblage, she creates large-scale mosaic works constructed entirely from recycled aluminum cans — soda, beer, and energy drink cans meticulously cut, shaped, and layered to form images of striking clarity and depth.

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The experience of her work is intentionally dual. From a distance, Pace's portraits project vibrancy and cohesion. Closer, the viewer discovers the raw material beneath — thousands of individual fragments, each carrying its own history of manufacture and consumption, now reconstituted into something new. This tension between wholeness and component, between beauty and waste, is central to her practice. Her work asks what we discard, what we overlook, and what becomes possible when familiar things are seen differently.

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Pace spent three decades in investment banking and corporate finance before returning fully to her creative life. The pivot was catalyzed in 2022, when she began collaborating with her youngest son during his hospitalization on a portrait of President Obama — a figure he deeply admired. Though the physical construction was hers, she credits her son as the spark that reignited her artistic identity. The piece sold before it was completed. She has worked as a full-time artist since.

Her choice of material is deliberate and autobiographical. Recycled aluminum — discarded, reformed, made luminous — mirrors her own experience of reinvention. Pace's portraits are not only likenesses; they are arguments for what transformation looks like when it is built by hand, one fragment at a time.