Artist Tobi Kahn will present the Bettie and Samuel Roberts Jewish Art Lectureship "Distilled Beauty: The Art of Tobi Kahn,” on Tuesday, April 8, at 7:30 p.m., in the Barone Campus Center Dogwood Room. This livestreamed lecture is co-sponsored by the Fairfield University Art Museum, and the Bennett Center for Judaic Studies.
Since being chosen as one of nine artists to be included in the 1985 Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum exhibition, “New Horizons in American Art,” Tobi Kahn’s work has been showcased in over 70 solo exhibitions and 60 museum and group shows. His paintings and sculptures have been displayed in prominent museum collections, including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Houston Museum of Fine Arts, Texas; The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC; Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY; Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minnesota; Yale University Art Gallery, Connecticut; Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia; and The Jewish Museum, New York. His traveling museum exhibitions include Tobi Kahn: Metamorphoses; Avoda: Objects of the Spirit; Microcosmos; Tobi Kahn: Sky & Water; and Tobi Kahn: Sacred Spaces for the 21st Century.
Kahn’s works explore memory, healing, interfaith, meditation, and spirituality. He starts each painting with his own photograph of nature, cropping it to reveal nature’s abstract elements. Each piece is open-ended, allowing the art to impact viewers in their unique interpretation. Kahn was raised in an observant Orthodox Jewish community in Washington Heights, New York City. He is a child of German Holocaust survivors and is named after his uncle, Arthur Kahn, an artist and medical student, who is believed to be one of the first Jews murdered by Hitler in 1933. Kahn’s upbringing has instilled a deep connection to Jewish faith, ritual, and tradition. He takes inspiration from his spirituality through several works, like his use of ‘t’chelet’, a light blue color symbolizing healing, and his creation of contemporary Jewish ceremonial pieces. Kahn’s art transcends denominations, as each piece welcomes the spirituality of others to play a piece in the puzzle.
Kahn’s most recent exhibition, Memory and Inheritance, at the Museum at Eldridge Street Synagogue, New York, comprises 48 works from the last thirty years of his career. The exhibition also featured his well-known works, including his wooden Omer counters “Saphyr,” which track the 49 days between the second Passover seder and the start of Shavuot, and his “Sky and Water,” paintings, two-toned blue paintings that allude to the water meeting the sky, or heaven meeting earth. Each of Kahn’s paintings includes nearly twenty layers of paint, creating a movement and vibrancy that is only enhanced when viewing his works in person.
His commissioned installments are located from the west to the east coast: SHALEV, an outdoor sculpture, New Harmony, IN; EMET, a meditative space for the HealthCare Chaplaincy, NYC; two sculptural Holocaust memorial gardens, La Jolla, CA, and Tenafly, NJ; M’AHL, a floor installation in the exhibition Rendering the Unthinkable, 9/11 Memorial Museum, NYC, as well as two bronze memorial sculptures for the Grey Art Gallery of NYU, and the 9/11 Memorial Museum, NYC; a meditative space for Auburn Theological Seminary, NYC; and an outdoor sculpture installation and painting for the East Falls campus of Thomas Jefferson University, Philadelphia, PA.
For over 30 years, Kahn has taught fine arts at New York’s School of Visual Arts. He has served as a guest lecturer on an international scale, speaking on art and visual expression as a form of healing at universities and public forums.
The lecture will be held on Tuesday, April 8, 7:30 p.m., in the BCC's Dogwood Room and is available to livestream. To learn more about upcoming events through the Bennett Center, please visit fairfield.edu/bennettcenter.
