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Ray Kass is an American artist whose paintings are based in landscape painting in both representational and abstract depictions. His principal medium has been watercolor on paper, often combined with oil emulsion and dry pigments, and unusual surface effects such as distressed or “smoked” paper, that are usually sealed with beeswax and mounted on panels. His involvement with art has engaged him in critical writing, curating, and organizing events to bring artists together with communities of differing backgrounds and expertise. His first significant solo exhibition was in 1972 at the Allan Stone Gallery in New York City and was comprised mainly of colorful very large abstract paintings on paper that he had painted in Northern California on bluffs overlooking the rugged Pacific coastline. He continued exhibiting at Allan Stone through 1986 and subsequently has had solo exhibitions in New York organized by Schmidt-Bingham Gallery (1991), Arts Du Monde (1992), A.V.C Gallery (2001), ZONE: Chelsea Center for the Arts (2005), Baumgartner Gallery (2007), ir77 Contemporary Art (2010), and Garvey|Simon (2015 – present.) Since 1991 he has had periodic solo exhibtions at the Reynolds Gallery in Richmond, Virginia. In 1983, his work was included in Painting in the South, 1680-1980, at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts; a survey of 300 years of painting related to a southern context, and in 2000 in  200 Years of Virginia Landscape at the Virginia Historical Society. Paintings by Ray Kass are in the permanent collections of the Ogunquit Museum of Art, The Montgomery Museum of Fine Art, The Addison Gallery of American Art, The Nevada Museum of Art, The Taubman Museum of Art, and many private and corporate collections.

= Art Career = Kass has taught in the art programs at various colleges and universities, including Humboldt State College (1969-71), the University of New Hampshire (1972), Keene State College (1975), and at Virginia Tech from 1976 until his retirement as emeritus professor of art in 2003.

Kass’ activities at Virginia Tech inspired him to undertake writing and curatorial projects. In 1977 he organized (with Jonathan Williams) a large exhibition of Southern photography, I Shall Save One Land Unvisited, that opened at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Wash.D.C. and closed at the International Center for Photography in New York City. He curated the traveling retrospective exhibition Morris Graves: Vision of The Inner Eye, for the Phillips Collection in Wash.D.C. (1983), and organized a traveling exhibition, John Cage/ New River Watercolors  for the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (with Julia Boyd) in 1988, and co-curated with Marshall N. Price, The Sight of Silence: John Cages Watercolors, for the National Academy Museum in New York in 2012.

His publications include The Mountain Lake Symposium and Workshop: Art in Locale (co-edited with with Howard Risatti), Longwood Center for the Visual Arts with the University of Virginia Press, 2018; The Sight of Silence: John Cage’s Complete Watercolors (National Academy with the Univ. of Virginia Press, 2011); John Cage: Zen Ox-Herding Pictures (with Stephen Addiss), Braziller, NY (2009); and Morris Graves: Vision of the Inner-Eye, (George Braziller, NY,1983).

Kass’ solo exhibtions, collaborative and curatorial projects, and publications have been reviewed  in magazines, newspapers and online journals including Art In America, Art News, ARTFORUM, Art Papers, Arts Magazine, The New Art Examiner, the Washington Post, the Roanoke Times, and the New York Times, among others.

= Mountain Lake Symposium and Workshop = In 1980, he founded The Mountain Lake Symposium and Workshop, an annual art criticism conference and an ongoing series of collaborative, community-based art project drawing on the cultural, environmental and technological resources of the New River Valley and the Appalachian region. The art critic, Donald B. Kuspit, was an advisor and annual participant in all of the symposia, which after 1983 Kass co-directed with art historian, Howard Risatti. The Mountain Lake Symposium conferences included critics Dan Cameron, Clement Greenberg, Robert Pincus –Witten, Rosalind Krauss, Annette Michelson, Kay C. Larson, Irving Sandler, Nancy Holt, Carrie Rickey, Derek Guthrie, Suzi Gablik, John Yau, and artists Joseph Kosuth, Keith Sonnier, Ed Paske, Nancy Holt, Allan Kaprow, Ronald Jones, Tim Rollins, and architectural historians Juan Pablo Bonta, Kenneth Frampton, Carroll William Westfall and Anthony Vidler, and many others. Participating artists in the Mountain Lake Workshop programs include Walter Darby Bannard, John Cage, Anthony Caro, Marie Cosindas, Howard Finster, Dorothea Rockburne,Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Jackie Matisse, M.C. Richards, Wayne Thiebaud, Merce Cunningham and Cy Twombly, among others.

= Early Life = Born in Rockville Centre, New York on January 25, 1944 to Juliette Van den Langenbergh and Jacob Kass, a commercial truck painter and letterer, who became a late-life folk art painter using hand saws and other tools. The family lived in Baldwin on the south shore of Long Island near the canals and estuary waters that led to the Atlantic Ocean. Ray Kass was a cartoonist for the Baldwin High School newspaper, The Golden Wave, and subsequently attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he was a cartoonist for the school newspaper, The Daily Tarheel, and later the Editor-in-Chief of the university literary magazine, The Carolina Quarterly for the academic year of 1965 & 66. He earned his BA degree in Philosophy from Carolina in 1967 and then an MFA degree at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in painting and art criticism in 1969.

= Notes = He is also notable for his many-paneled, or “polyptych”, painting a format that he developed for avant garde composer John Cage, although Cage died before he could use it in his four workshops with Kass (1983-1990), and it became an important feature of Kass’ nature oriented abstract works, sometimes at very large scale.

The Appalachian Mountains and the traditional Scots-Irish culture of the area in which the high-tech research and development communities at Virginia Tech were located, provided Kass creative challenges.

More information is available at http://www.raykass.com/  and  http://mountainlakeworkshop.org/

= Further Readings = Addison Gallery of American Art

Keith Crown

Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts, Montgomery, AL

Smithsonian Archives of American Art

Taubman Museum of Art