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SIGNED EXHIBITION ANNOUNCEMENTS:

AMERICAN ARTISTS,

RAY KASS & JACOB KASS

THREE ARTIST EXHIBITION ANNOUNCEMENTS/INVITATIONS, TWO OF WHICH ARE INSCRIBED & SIGNED BY THE ARTIST, RAY KASS.

Three printed exhibition announcements. 1984-1987. Two are exhibitions of paintings by Ray Kass, and one is for painted saws, by Ray Kass’ father, Jacob Kass. Two are inscribed and signed by Ray Kass.

 

RAY KASS – Watercolor Artist, Author, and Professor Emeritus of Art at Virginia Tech. Ray Kass is an internationally recognized painter whose works reside in many public and private collections. As well as his exhibitions, his publications (reviews, articles and catalogues) on art and artists are numerous. Founded by Kass in 1983, the Mountain Lake Workshop is a collaborative, community-based art project drawing on the customs, environmental and technological resources of the New River Valley and the Appalachian region. The interdisciplinary character of the workshops has focused on collaborative projects with highly specialized scientific communities in microbiology and supercomputing. Kass often spends more than two years in study and planning sessions with guest artists and science and technology professionals to develop the various discipline-centered activities that become the strategic basis of each workshop. The strategic development of individual workshops has become integrally related to new projects, and provides the basis for their interconnectedness.
Mountain Lake workshops usually result in exhibitions – some have been widely traveled. Many works from the Mountain Lake workshops have entered the permanent collections of museums worldwide – including the Museum of Modern Art, (NY) The Whitney museum of American Art (NY), The Menil Museum (Houston), and the High Museum (Atlanta).

Artists who have completed several workshops at Mountain Lake include folk-artist Howard Finster (1918-2001), Japanese artist and sculptor Jiro Okura, the late avant-garde composer, writer and artist John Cage (1912- 1992) East Harlem street artist and muralist, James De La Vega, Colorado based eco-artist, Lynn Hull, waste management installation-artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles (official artist in residence of the New York Sanitation Dept.), ceramic artist, poet and author of the seminal book, Centering, M.C. Richards (1916-1999), sculptor in light forms and virtual reality, artist Jackie Matisse Monnier, artist &  Zen-Buddhist art scholar  Stephen Addiss, and  choreographer and dance master, Merce Cunningham(1919-2009), among many others

 

Jacob Kass (1910-2000), American Folk Artist and father of Ray Kass, painted on tools of all sizes and shapes -- handsaws, circular saws, ice saws, coping saws, sickles, corn cutters, and carpenter's squares. Kass experienced America through the turbulent years of the depression, World War II, and the cold war, as well as the struggles for civil and women's rights, but he chose not to focus on the problems of the world. Instead, he illustrated people at work and at play in idealized rural and urban settings. His dense cityscapes show buildings and rooftops, pushcarts, moving days, baseball games on corner lots, and kids playing hopscotch. The pastoral works feature barns and outbuildings, farmers sowing the fields, horses frolicking in meadows, and people skating on ponds. His settings were based on composite memories of half a century spent in Brooklyn's East New York neighborhood and his retirement in Vershire, Vermont, and Largo, Florida. Kass generally maintained a distance between himself and his subjects, and his panoramic scenes reveal a reverence for nature and rare sensitivity to the rhythm of the seasons and daily weather. His works are elegant views of everyday life magically transformed into personal tone poems.

Jacob Kass was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1910. A second generation artisan sign and letter painter, he worked for nearly forty years in the business his father started, retiring in 1983. After his retirement to Vershire, Vermont, Kass became interested in repairing, decorating, and reselling furniture and accessories he bought at flea markets and auctions. His early embellishments on milk cans and frying pans soon gave way to delicate scene-paintings on saws and other cutting tools, culled from five decades as a sign painter. Beginning with a depiction of his Vermont house, he painted landscapes and scenes of his New England surroundings, memories of his Brooklyn neighborhood, and idealized scenes of Largo, Florida, where he spent winters with his wife. Widely heralded, Kass received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, in 1981. He was honored with solo shows at the Tampa Museum of Art (1994), Mennello Museum of Folk Art (1999), and the American Folk Art Museum (2002). Kass died in 2000.

A synthesis of whimsy, practicality, and precision, Jacob Kass’s found-object paintings call upon his sign-painter roots, but thwart utility for pastoral visions of the American experience. Interested mainly in the New England landscapes around him, the Brooklyn of his childhood, and panoramas of tropical bliss in Largo, Florida, Kass imbued each with a nostalgia and idealization that make us yearn for a simpler time. The panoramas, which often show buildings and scenes of daily life, have an overarching reflexivity, in that, the very buildings shown could have been fashioned by the tools on which their likeness is now reproduced. While the use of found materials recalls American Folk Art, the scenes themselves are reminiscent of 1930s Regionalism, the Hudson River School painters, and, most closely, the Dutch genre paintings of Pieter Bruegel the Elder [from the artist’s site].

 

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