|
Psychology Department’s
“Artist in Residence”
Irwin Kremen, an assistant professor emeritus
of psychology, is known almost as well for his art as for the academic
career that has been his primary occupation.
This spring, “Irwin Kremen: Beyond Black Mountain (1996-2006),”
a retrospective featuring more than 160 of the artist’s works,
opened at the Nasher Museum of Art. The exhibition, which will
run through June 19, comprises collages, paintings, and sculpture
that span the forty years that Kremen has been making art—since
he began in earnest at age forty-one, three years into his teaching
career at Duke. On April 29, Kremen will lecture on a series of
eleven collages included in the exhibition that relate to images
of the Holocaust.
Many of Kremen’s collages consist of scraps of weathered paper
he gathered during overseas travels. His sculptures, often large
in scale, are composed of iron, saw blades, and steel, among other
materials.
Kremen’s career as part-scholar, part-artist actually began years
before he joined the Duke faculty, years before he considered psychology
an interest, much less a career choice. He dropped out of Northwestern
University after three years and worked as a reporter and a columnist
for a local newspaper before moving to New York. There, he read
an article about Black Mountain College, an art school near Asheville,
North Carolina. “I immediately got on the train and went down there,”
he said in a 2000 Duke Magazine profile, “and I decided that was
the place for me to go.”
At Black Mountain, he concentrated on his writing, forming a close
relationship with teacher M.C. Richards, a writer and potter. In
1951 in New York, Richards introduced him to celebrated artists
associated with Black Mountain—John Cage, David Tutor, and Merce
Cunningham—all of whom became close friends and eventually ardent
supporters.
Later, after Kremen had discovered his love for psychology and
made his start along an academic career path, Richards pushed him
to turn his attention to collage making. What began in the late
1960s as a personal experiment would morph into a lifelong pursuit.
Kremen’s debut exhibit was organized by the Smithsonian Institution’s
National Collection in 1978; since then, his work has been shown
in more than thirty venues at museums and art centers nationally
and abroad. “The Art of Irwin Kremen,” an exhibition consisting
of seventy-three collages and seventeen metal sculptures, was displayed
at the Nasher’s predecessor, the Duke University Museum of Art,
in 1990.
www.nasher.duke.edu
www.dukemagazine.duke.edu/alumni/dm30/collage.html |
