Here's a piece from today's Santa Rosa Press Democrat on our local winner, formerly artist-in-residence at the San Francisco Exploratorium. Graton is a few miles west of Sebastopol, near Iron Horse Winery.
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Graton 'genius' finds his art in nature
MacArthur grant-winning artist says $500,000 award will give him more leeway to experiment with his creations
October 7, 2003
By JEREMY HAY
THE PRESS DEMOCRAT
Ned Kahn, a science buff turned artist, was doing OK: great wife, two great kids, a nice house in Graton, two big workshops -- one a converted hay barn -- public artwork commissions around the nation, a forklift in the garage.
Then came the phone call: Ned, you've won a $500,000 MacArthur Foundation grant, no strings attached.
Well, how do you think the Connecticut native, a longtime Buddhist who studied botany and environmental science in college, reacted to winning what is dubbed a "genius grant"?
"I was just kind of in shock," Kahn, 43, said Monday in his hay barn, where he tinkers, draws, grinds and cuts, creating sculptures -- usually very large pieces -- that capture and illustrate the scientific underpinnings of the natural world.
He's been battling a cold, "so my mind and body are out of whack," he said, and besides, when the MacArthur folks called, he had other pressing matters to attend to.
He'd just realized that he'd mis-measured -- by a lot -- and that 65 parts he'd had made for a 100-foot-long public art display were the wrong size.
"There's a cognitive dissonance between getting a genius grant and messing up," said Kahn, who moved to Graton in 1998 after 12 years as artist-in-residence at the Exploratorium, the popular San Francisco science museum.
Dissonance or no, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, which on Sunday announced the 24 people chosen to receive this year's awards, thinks Kahn has a breakthrough mind for linking science and art.
In announcing his fellowship -- five annual, taxable payments of $100,000 -- the foundation described him as a "science exhibit artist" whose exhibits "strike an emotional chord, reminding the viewer of nature's capacity to inspire apprehension, serenity, wonder and awe."
Kahn said the award will allow him to concentrate less on searching for public art commissions to pay the bills, and more time to "experiment, to play about."
While a student at the University of Connecticut, Kahn became fascinated by the theories and metaphors of science, but realized "that when it came to the actual doings of it, I didn't have the right mind for it."
He began his career as an artist of science in 1982 as a $5-an-hour apprentice at the Exploratorium, which he visited and fell in love with.
"I said, 'You've got to give me a job here,'" he recalled.
Using materials such as soap bubbles and oil, glass, metals and mirrors, and forces of nature like wind, water and light, he has created public artworks including stationary tornadoes, walls where the surfaces change shape and color in the wind and sunlight, whirlpools and a spinning forest of nails that makes music as steel balls fall through it.
UC Berkeley geologist Raymond Jeanloz, who won a MacArthur fellowship of his own in the 1980s, said Kahn's work "plays a really important role in science education."
Scientists are often "so focused on just advancing the technical that we often forget to translate how intriguing the world is," he said.
Kahn's sculptures, created at the intersection of art and science and on the "fringes of traditional fields," do just that, he said. "They're a way of tying into the kid inside all of us."
Kahn eats oatmeal and yogurt for breakfast, doesn't know how to use his wife's food processor and says his favorite movie is Bill Murray's "Groundhog Day."
In his workshop on Monday, wearing a threadbare sweatshirt, khaki shorts and tennis shoes, he spun a large, flat, waist-high wheel, about two inches thick with a glass face held in an iron frame.
The frame was mounted on a leg rising from a heavy base, and inside the wheel microscopic glass beads like white sand swirled against a dark background, creating -- well, you name it, surf patterns, Asian landscapes, galaxies.
It's the kind of thing people can stare at for a long time, lost in thought and imagination. It's about the interaction between materials and energy, not about the artist.
And that's how Kahn, who traces his influences to Buddhism as well as artists and scientists, intends it.
"I've tried to take my own ego, my own skill out of it. It's really the material that's doing the sculpting," he said, "something other than me."
His work, he said springs from this: "Every once in a while in my life, I've had this feeling of how amazing and weird the world is. And I love that feeling. If anyone ever has that type of feeling from looking at one of my things, that's good enough for me."
You can reach Staff Writer Jeremy Hay at 521-5212 or
jhay@pressdemocrat.com.
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