Teddy's Boots by Carol Kingston Conte on Reeves paper: 16 x 14 inches.

Polo Ponies by Carol Kingston Oil on Canvas: 35 x 29 inches unframed. (Click images for blowups.)

With a B.F.A. from Syracuse University, an M.F.A. from Long Island University, and training at the School of Visual Arts and The Art Students' League in New York, Carol Vollet Kingston was already a practicing painter when she was invited by the Joffrey Ballet, in 1979, to design "Momentum" for the young Chinese choreographer, Choo San Goh - and her distinguished career as a stage designer began. From that time until Goh's death in 1987, the choreographer and designer collaborated successfully on twenty-three ballets, many of them now staged and restaged dozens of times internationally in the repertories of some of the world's most respected dance companies.

Kingston has also designed more than one hundred works for such choreographers as Alvin Ailey, Ulysses Dove, Talley Beatty, Gerald Arpino, and Arthur Mitchell, and her work has been seen at the Paris Opera, the Royal Danish Ballet, the London Festival Ballet, the Royal Swedish Ballet, the Australian Ballet, the Cape Town Ballet and the State Theatre Ballet in Pretoria, South Africa, the Dance Theatre of Harlem, the American Ballet Theatre, and at Lincoln Center in New York and the Kennedy Center in Washington.

In recent years, however, Carol Kingston has been devoting her time to works and installations that include drawings, oil, photographs, electro-printing, plastic R.P. screen, canvas, and construction. She draws everyday, takes endless photographs, and she says that technique, the actual process by which media are mixed, must be as seductive as her inferred subject matter. She explained her recent drawing installations, The Last Supper and Heads of State, as "what Leonardo didn't picture, under the table: ends, beginnings, power, weakness, the inhuman and (she insists) the funny." Her work, Carol Kingston says, is "about" something. "I want to seduce the viewer into looking, to figure out what a construction or a drawing is about." Her own preconceptions are merely what art has always been preoccupied with: "What is seen and not seen; light, and shape; as well as some everlasting concerns like power and affection, being lost and found, the human and he bestial. And with new things that come to hand..."

Currently, Carol teaches drawing and painting at the C.W. Post College of Long Island University. Some of her "Wild West" pieces were shown in 2002 in London, and this spring a restaging of one of her ballets by the Louisville Ballet was accompanied by a show of her work, with observations by the artist, at two other Louisville institutions.

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