Born in Dayton, Ohio in 1932, back when America thought it had figured out what it wanted to be, she got out. Did the expected thing first: BFA from Bowling Green, MFA from UCLA. But then she did what artists who actually give a damn do: she went to Paris in 1966, to Atelier 17, that legendary print studio where Stanley William Hayter had been churning out revolutionaries: Max Ernst, Alberto Giacometti, Joan Miró, Alexander Calder, Marc Chagall, Willem de Kooning, Robert Motherwell, and Helen Phillips. She studied with Philip Guston and Robert Blackburn in New York, soaking up abstract expressionism when it meant something, when it could hurt you, change your state of being.
By 1971, she landed at UC Santa Cruz, not to coast, but to build. She established the printmaking department there. Trained generations of artists who remembered her name, who came back to see her long after they’d graduated because she was the real thing. A true Professor a true Artist. She retired in 1992, but retirement for Kay just meant she could finally create what she wanted, when she wanted.
And what she wanted was the wetlands. Those muddy, misunderstood, criminally overlooked stretches of southern Santa Cruz County that most people drive past without a second thought. She’d haul her easel out there with her painter friends, Mary Warshaw, Marta Gaines, and chase the light. Plein air in most seasons, “though not all weather,” as she’d say, because even Kay had limits.
Her work ended up where it deserved to be: the Library of Congress, the New York Public Library, the Phoenix Art Museum, the Monterey Museum of Art. Museums in France kept her prints. The Triton Museum gave her a posthumous solo show in 2019 because even dead, her work demands attention.
But here’s the thing about Kay: she didn’t just paint the wetlands, she fought for them. Served on the board of Watsonville Wetlands Watch, helped publish their book, got her hands dirty in the actual work of conservation. She understood something most artists miss: you can’t just aestheticize a place and call it love.
You have to show up. You have to protect it. Give more than take.
She was political. Engaged. A deep thinker who wasn’t afraid to speak her mind, which today is usually code for “she made people uncomfortable,” which is another way of saying she told the truth, her truth.
Kay Metz died in Santa Cruz in 2018. She was 86. She left behind students who became artists, wetlands that stayed wild, a beautiful 1925 Craftsman Bungalow and Art Studio that my family is privileged to call home, and paintings that understood something fundamental about light and landscape and the spaces in between that most of us never see.