Gary Kuehn
Gary Kuehn was born in New Jersey in 1939 and lives and works in New York and Wellfleet. He received his MFA in 1964 from Rutgers University and in the 1970s became a professor of fine arts at Rutgers, retiring with the rank of Distinguished Professor after nearly 40 years of teaching. Kuehn has played a significant role in Process Art and Post-Minimalism, having participated in the groundbreaking exhibitions Eccentric Abstraction in 1966 curated by Lucy Lippard and When Attitudes Become Form in 1969 curated by Harold Szeeman.
As a young adult, Kuehn worked as a union construction worker which became formative in the development of his work and shaped his relationship to the physicality of raw materials. By allowing the materials and techniques, themselves inherently expressive, to assert themselves, he was able to distance himself from the decision-making process, in effect becoming the instigator or “unmoved mover.” The logic of construction coupled with his aversion to dogmatic formal solutions, provided him with a personal, familiar, and productive aesthetic base from which to proceed.
Working with chance procedures and the inherent qualities of materials, Kuehn’s work considers the binary forces that dictate any material or human interaction. Soft/hard, solid/liquid, freedom/control, these are some of the contradictory themes that Kuehn forces into a relationship. Working not only across mediums, but also in varied modes of abstraction and representation, what unifies his work is the sensual attention to material and the authority of geometry.
In 2014 the Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein mounted the retrospective exhibition “Between Sex and Geometry, and in 2018 GAMeC – Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art of Bergamo presented a major survery of Kuehns work titled “Practitioner’s Delight.” Kuehn has been the recipient of the National Endowment for the Arts (1976), DAAD Fellowship (1978) and the Francis J Greenburger Award (1992). His work is included in collections at the Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, Kunstmuseum St. Gallen, Museum Ludwig, Museum für Moderne Kunst Frankfurt, Stedelijk Museum, Musuem of Modern Art Vienna, and Neuer Berliner Kunstverein, among others.
Sid Sachs
Sid Sachs was the Director of Exhibitions at the University of the Arts from 1998 to 2024. In 1972, he began working in commercial galleries in New York and Philadelphia. His first of over 120 exhibitions was curated in 1979. Some major projects include the Herbert Waide Hemphill Collection of American Folk Art (1988), Conspicuous Display (1989) for Rutgers University, and Pop Abstraction (1998) for the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Pew Center for the Arts & Heritage funded Yvonne Rainer; Radical Juxtapositions 1961 – 2002 which was the first retrospective to present her choreography and cinema. Yvonne Rainer was awarded the best monographic exhibition from the New England branch of AICA in 2003. Seductive Subversion; Women Pop Artists 1958-1968, the first exhibit on this subject, won the national AICA award for the Best Thematic Museum exhibition of 2010. Artnews cited this exhibit as the seventh most influential of the decade. Another Pew funded program, Invisible City: Philadelphia and the Vernacular Avant-garde, (2020) was installed in four Philadelphia venues and accompanied by a symposium and a reenactment of Kaprow’s Chicken happening by Alex Da Corte. Selected one-person exhibits developed by Sachs included Bill Beckley, Leidy Churchman, Mike Cloud, Sara Cwynar, Robert Crumb, Sari Dienes, Jim Dine, Rosalyn Drexler, John Duff, Ron Gorchov, Samson Kambalu, Jonathan Lasker, Ken Lum, Dave McKenzie Ree Morton, Matt Mullican, Anne Neukamp, Isamu Noguchi, Thomas Nozkowski, Jack Pierson, Tal R, Lucas Samaras, John Stezaker, Lenore Tawney, Robert Watts, Wilmer Wilson IV, Rose Wylie, and Lebbeus Woods. Sachs was an adjunct associate professor of art history and has published essays in Art in America, Arts, American Ceramics, Burlington Magazine, Metalsmith, The New Art Examiner, and catalogs for Bucknell University, Lafayette College, Galerie Gmurzynska, Sari Dienes Foundation, and Hollis Taggart Gallery.