Mary Royall Wilgis is a contemporary American artist whose work focuses on light, color, and time. Originally from South Carolina and now based in Brooklyn, New York, she has developed a singular artistic practice she describes as light foraging, a way of roaming her environment to capture and translate luminous phenomena.
A graduate in visual arts, Wilgis draws inspiration from everyday sensory experiences: the shifting light on a building façade, the shadows of leaves, the fleeting reflections of an afternoon. These moments become the raw material of her work, which she later transposes in the studio through layers of oil paint, translucent fabrics, or transparent supports. This process creates works in which color seems to float, vibrate, and interact with ambient light.
Her paintings are often titled with the place and exact time when the light was observed, like a visual diary that testifies to the intimate link between space, time, and perception. Her approach echoes the legacy of the Light and Space movement (California, 1960s), while also drawing on influences such as James Turrell, Georgia O’Keeffe, and Ellsworth Kelly.
Beyond formal experimentation, her work carries a deeply personal dimension. Wilgis recalls how observing light provided refuge and strength during a period marked by illness, and how her queer identity shapes a heightened sensitivity to vision, difference, and multiplicity of perspectives. This tension between fragility and wonder, between shadow and clarity, permeates her entire body of work.
Her paintings and installations have been shown in group exhibitions in the United States and abroad, and are part of private collections in New York, London, and Geneva. In 2023, she was awarded the Innovate Artist Grant, which highlights emerging contemporary artists.
Today, Mary Royall Wilgis continues to develop a practice in which painting becomes both a sensory and meditative experience, a way of seizing the ephemeral to reveal its enduring beauty.
