Ellsworth Kelly: Postcards

FROM KOLAJ 35

A Book & Exhibition at The Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery

Ellsworth Kelly (1923-2015) is celebrated for colorful hard-edge painting, minimalist public sculptures, and long history of lithography. Kelly had his first solo show at Galerie Arnaud in Paris in 1951. Throughout his life, he was celebrated as the quintessential, 20th century American artist. A lesser known detail about Kelly was that he was a dedicated and prolific collage artist. This was less of a secret and more of an often neglected detail about his practice.

Throughout his career, Kelly used collage to work through ideas about painting and sculpture. Collage afforded him an immediate way to see an idea executed in a space, albeit the fictional one of the postcards he often used as substrates for his collage. Where his painting and sculpture, with their hard edges and single color, can sometimes come off as cold and impersonal, Kelly’s collages feel deeply personal. Sometimes they were sent to friends and acquaintances. An exhibition of Kelly’s postcard collages at the Tang Museum at Skidmore College, July-November 2021, presented a broad overview of this body of work. The exhibition travels to the Blanton Museum of Art at the University of Texas at Austin in the summer of 2022. A companion book, Ellsworth Kelly: Postcards, presents new scholarship and goes deeper into Kelly’s practice of collage making and what the collages reveal about him. In Kolaj 35, Ric Kasini Kadour interviewed Ian Berry, Dayton Director of the Tang Museum, about Kelly’s collages.

The full article appears in Kolaj 35. From the Scottish Highlands to the shores of Lake Ontario to Mombasa, Kenya, the printed magazine brings the wide-world of collage to your doorstep. To read the full article, SUBSCRIBE to Kolaj Magazine or Order a Copy of the Issue.

I became aware of Ellsworth’s postcard collages more than twenty-five years ago when I worked for him as a studio assistant, before I went to grad school and before I became a curator. I saw these collages and they were part of his project. I would say that Ellsworth Kelly actually has a pretty well-known collage practice. You’re absolutely right that painting and sculpture is foregrounded within the hierarchy of his work. Collage has always been present from the late ‘40s, when he was just developing the aspects of his practice

“I have work to free shape from its ground and then to work the shape so that it has a definite relationship to the space around it; so that it has a clarity and a measure within itself of its parts (angles, curves, edges and mass); and so that with color and tonality the shape finds itself in its own space and always demand its freedom and separateness.”
—Ellsworth Kelly

The full article appears in Kolaj 35. From the Scottish Highlands to the shores of Lake Ontario to Mombasa, Kenya, the printed magazine brings the wide-world of collage to your doorstep. To read the full article, SUBSCRIBE to Kolaj Magazine or Order a Copy of the Issue.

“Ellsworth Kelly: Postcards” was at The Tang Museum at Skidmore College, 10 July-28 November 2021. The show was curated by Ian Berry in collaboration with the Ellsworth Kelly Studio, and with Jessica Eisenthal, Independent Curator. tang.skidmore.edu/exhibitions/275-ellsworth-kelly-postcards

Ian Berry is Dayton Director of The Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College. He holds an MA from the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard Collage and a BA in Art History from the University at Albany. Before coming to Skidmore College in 2000, Berry was Assistant Curator at the Williams College Museum of Art. He also served as Consulting Director of the Emerson Gallery at Hamilton College and was the 2009-2010 Roy Acuff Chair of Excellence in the Creative Arts at Austin Peay University. Berry has organized over ninety museum exhibitions.