Kenneth R. Kahn Biography

For over 40 years, Ken led Arts Councils in Maryland, Florida, Texas and Connecticut.

Ken has initiated arts and tourism marketing campaigns, Artists Fellowship programs, public art programs, neighborhood arts and heritage grants programs, regional cultural consortia, and statewide advocacy efforts.

An avid painter and cartoonist, Ken has also consulted extensively for many cultural entities and served on national and regional arts service organizations’ boards. As a teenager, Ken studied on Long Island with figurative painter and sculptor Elias Friedensohn, and later at Hamilton College with painter James Penney. After college, he attended classes at the School of Visual Arts in New York studying with Burt Hasen, Herbert Katzman, Burne Hogarth, Chaim Koppelman, and James Wines.

Thereafter he produced an extensive series of circus paintings shown at the Kretschmer Gallery in NY and at the Bridgeport Museum of Art, Science, and Industry.

Ken then spent a year in Barcelona creating a series of large-scale watercolors on the daily life of the city shown there at ExpoArt Gallery. Back in New York, Ken painted a series of large pastels of friends and colleagues in their workplaces.

He and his family moved in roughly ten year interludes to accommodate his work as an Arts Council Director all the while painting landscapes and portraits documenting life around him. Baltimore, Miami, Fort Worth, and Hartford in addition to summers at Bayside Maine offered subjects.

Most of Ken’s work is dispersed in more than 300 private collections around the USA and overseas as well as a number of corporate collections, notably McCormick Spice Co. in Baltimore and Hartford Hospital, each owning ten landscapes.

Ken is also an accomplished, cartoonist and accepts occasional portrait commissions. Much of Ken’s current work focuses on the Connecticut, Maine, and South Florida landscape.

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