Kelly was born in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and studied at Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts. His paintings have been acquired by public and private collections in Europe and the United States, including The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; The Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY; New Mexico Museum of Art, Santa Fe, NM, Milwaukee Art Museum, Milwaukee, WI; Smith College Art Museum, Northampton MA; Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum, Rutger's University, NJ; Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts, Montgomery; The Fogg Museum, Cambridge, MA; The Margulies Collection, Miami, FL; and the McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, Kelly has traveled throughout the United States, Europe, North Africa, the Near East, and Nepal. His work often incorporates unusual materials from his journeys, among them vintage posters and printed antique paper, obscured and layered in saturated pigments on a canvas faintly scored with irregular grids. Kelly's paintings have been likened to palimpsests and his method described as one of building "meticulously on inhabited ground, layering materials, documents, and signs, covering them, wiping out their beauty, nearly, but allowing something of the labor and their languages to persist." Robert Kelly is the son of Daniel T. Kelly Jr. (1921-2020), a U.S. Army Major who served in World War II and Korea and was awarded the Bronze Star as aide to Brigadier General Francis Rollins in France, and Jeanne Marie Wise (1922–1993), a SPGM2 in the U.S. Navy during World War II who instructed Free Aerial Gunnery at Pensacola Naval Air Base.