Kay Turner

Kay Turner is an artist and scholar working across disciplines including performance, writing, music, exhibition curation, and public and academic folklore.

She is noted for her feminist writings and performances on subjects such as women’s home altars, fairy tale witches, and historical goddess figures.

The subsequent book project, Beautiful Necessity: The Art and Meaning of Women's Altars (1999), is the most widely read of all of her publications, which also include books on the pop star Madonna, lesbian love letters, Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Tolkas, and on Grimms' fairy tales queerly revealed.

[3] In 1984, Kay Turner, Pat Jasper, and Betsy Peterson founded the non-profit folk arts organization Texas Folklife Resources.

Turner has served as curator of various museum and gallery exhibitions including Art Among Us/Arte Entre Nosotros: Mexican American Folk Art of San Antonio, (with Pat Jasper), San Antonio Museum of Art (1986); The Art of Asking: Home Altars and Yard Shrines in the Texas-Mexican Community, Institute of Texan Cultures (1988); Local Eyes: Folk Photography in Brooklyn, Five Myles Gallery (2002); Homo Home: Queer Objects for Gay Living, Cinders Gallery, Williamsburg, Brooklyn (2006); and Here Was New York: Twin Towers in Vernacular Memorial Images, a  multi-gallery exhibition of 350 photos, Brooklyn, New York.

Turner, who served as president of the American Folklore Society from 2015 to 2018, has said "To be a folklorist is to be entrusted with a diverse body of critical cultural knowledge, art, and practice and to be just ornery enough to believe the world is better off if we share it out in teaching, researching, writing, consulting, public programming, advocating, archiving, and engaging with each other as members of our Society.