In the nineteen-seventies and -eighties, Carol Vollet Kingston designed costumes and sets for the ballets of choreographers like Alvin Ailey, Choo San Goh, Talley Beatty and Gerald Arpino, and her work has been presented at the Paris Opera and Reggio Emilio, the Singapore Dance Theater and the Sydney Opera, the Royal Swedish, the Royal Danish, at Lincoln Center in New York and the Kennedy Center in the US, and at theaters around the world. Then, a decade or so ago, she began to devote herself to large works and installations that include drawings and paintings, on canvas, naugahyde, and plastic RP screen, sometimes with soundtracks, photographs, electro-printing and construction. She draws every day (even on the treadmill), takes endless photographs, and experiments continually with scale and medium. Technique, she says, must seduce the viewer into looking.

Much of Carol's work has been ironical and political; her drawing installations, “Words Spoken and Unspoken” and “Everyman” were shown in Capetown and Johannesburg, respectively, in 1999 and 2000; Some of her “Wild, Wild West” pieces were shown in London, in 2003, exposing a world of good and evil in an ambivalent culture. The four installations collectively known as the “Last Supper” series -- featuring contemporary political leaders, with ironic reference to Leonardo -- have been variously shown in the United States through the past two decades. The studies from which that work developed (both drawings and paintings) are now being extended as a continuing series of commissioned portraits.

Currently, Carol teaches graduate and undergraduate painting and drawing at the C.W. Post College of Long Island University. Her most recent body of work, using a vivid palette, includes the series "Floating" and "Mapping" and "Crossing," which have been shown in New York, Paris and Australia, at the Rice Gallery of Fine Art in Kansas City, the North Shore Architectural Stone Gallery in Long Island, the Beijing Art Fair, the San Francisco Art Fair and at the Gallery M. in Vienna. Upcoming this winter will be her annual presentation at the A. Jain Marunouchi group show in New York and the opening of the Lynda Anderson Gallery in Manhasset.