Exhibit “The Vibrant Material of Frances Kuehn” will be on display October 22 through November 21
October 2025 – The Drew University Art and Art History Departments will present the exhibition “The Vibrant Material of Frances Kuehn” at the Korn Gallery in the Dorothy Young Center for the Arts.
Enlarge
The exhibit, curated by Heather Cammarata-Seale, features realist large- and small-scale acrylic paintings by New York-based artist Frances Kuehn. It will open October 22 and run through November 21. A Curator Introduction and Reception will be held on Thursday, October 23, from 4-6 p.m. in the Korn Gallery. Admission to the exhibit and opening event are free.
About the exhibition:
As an art student at Rutgers University in the 1960s, Frances Kuehn was taught and mentored by the likes of burgeoning Pop and Fluxus artists Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Watts, and George Segal. Yet, she dedicated herself to the traditional art of figure painting. In 2003, however, she shifted focus and started painting meticulously rendered imagery of clothing, fabrics, and textiles, many of which belong to herself or loved ones.
“The Vibrant Material of Frances Kuehn” begins at this point of transition, chronicling the development of Kuehn’s work through the present in which she paints still lives of materials that evoke vital corporeal presences despite the absence of the human body. The title of the exhibition is inspired by the writings of Jane Bennett who, in Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things, posits that inanimate objects are not lifeless but lively and inherently affecting, marked by a personal history and filled with a power able to influence human thoughts and actions. Additionally, this exhibition explores how Kuehn uses her subject matter to investigate the relationship between depth and flatness, abstraction and representation, symmetry and imbalance, and photography and painting, as well as the materiality of painting itself.
About the artist:
Frances Kuehn is a painter who graduated from Douglass College, a residential women’s college housed at Rutgers University, with her BA in 1964 and her MFA in 1971. She received a New Jersey State Council on the Arts Fellowship in 1978 and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in 1982. Her work is included in various collections, including the Allen Memorial Art Museum at Oberlin College in Oberlin, Ohio; the Newark Museum in Newark, NJ; the New Jersey State Museum, in Trenton, NJ; the J.B. Speed Museum in Louisville, KY; and, the Power Institute at the University of Sydney in Sydney, Australia. Kuehn lives and works in New York City.
