Donald Kimes

Don Kimes is a visual artist, educator, and arts administrator. He received an MFA from the Brooklyn College campus of the City University of New York and was program director at the Studio School in New York, N.Y.

Kimes divides his time between Washington, D.C., where he is a professor of art at American University; Chautauqua, N.Y., where he has been visual arts director at the Chautauqua Institution since 1986; and various places in Italy. He has shown his work in more than 150 exhibitions around the world, including galleries and museums in New York City, Washington, Baltimore, and Buffalo, as well as in Madrid, Milan, and Munich, among many others.

When a 2003 flood destroyed Kimes’s home, studio, and 25 years of his artwork, he came to see the event as an “interruption” that would shape his future, and in time he began creating new works modeled on his impressions of older ones. He elaborated on this process in an artist’s statement:

“I spent months obsessively peeling apart drawings, paintings and photographs, trying to salvage something. … For the next three years I made small paintings based on the destroyed images. My work now is based on these studies: metaphoric works based on time, nature, memory, perceived loss and re-birth. …  I am using the second part of my life to re-paint the first. The flood turned out to be a gift, an exquisite interruption.

“While my work is based on autobiographical experience, the notion of searching for one’s humanity in the face of loss on a microcosmic level relates to the collective experience many have shared in the face of destruction – Japan, Katrina, or Pompeii for that matter. Art exists outside of time and mortality. Like the frescoes in Pompeii, it can be lost, forgotten and buried, but then rediscovered. At its highest level it is capable of transcending language, time, culture, and our own individual existence. There is a strange beauty in that cycle." [1]

For more information on Don Kimes, visit www.donkimes.com.

 [1] Don Kimes, untitled artist’s statement, http://www.denisebibrofineart.com/artists/2270. (Accessed 5/20/2014)