Ray Kass

Click on paintings to view larger image

Ray Kass is a nationally recognized painter and writer. His paintings have been widely exhibited and have been represented in New York City by the Allan Stone Gallery, A.V.C. Contemporary Arts Gallery, ZONE: Chelsea Center for the Arts, ir77 Contemporary Art, and for the past 19 years by Reynolds Gallery in Richmond, Virginia. He has received numerous grants and awards, including individual artists grants from the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts and from the National Endowment for the Arts. Ray Kass’ paintings reside in many public and private collections.

He is Professor Emeritus of Art at Virginia Tech, and founder and director of the Mountain Lake Workshop, a collaborative, community-based art project drawing on the customs, and on environmental and technological resources of the New River Valley and the Appalachian region.

Artists who have completed several workshops at Mountain Lake (or are currently engaged in ongoing projects) include folk-artist Howard Finster, Japanese artist & sculptor and Jiro Okura, the late avant-garde composer, writer and artist John Cage (1912-1992), waste management installation-artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles (official artist in residence of the New York Sanitation Dept.), ceramic artist, poet and author M.C. Richards (author of Centering), New York City street artist and poet James De La Vega, Colorado based eco-artist Lynne Hull, San Francisco architect and designer Peter Lau, Kyoto based traditional nanga-style sumi painters Michael Hofmann and Sano Jusho, New York micro-cinema artist Bruce McClure, Virginia blacksmith and artist Lee Sauder, Sculptor in fabric and light forms in virtual reality Jackie Matisse, artist and Zen Buddhist art scholar, Stephen Addiss, choreographer and modern dance master, Merce Cunningham (1919-2009) and Scots portraitist and installation artist James Donnelly, among others, as well as Kass himself, whose individual workshops seek to provide an interface between the concepts and discipline-centered activities of those of the visiting-artists.

View the artists and projects of the Mountain Lake Workshop

His publications include numerous reviews, articles and catalogues including: John Cage: Ox-Herding Pictures (with Stephen Addiss), Braziller, NY (2009), Sounds of the Inner Eye: John Cage, Mark Tobey and Morris Graves, University of Washington Press, Seattle and London (2002) - (also in German:Klange des Inneren Auges, Kunsthalle Bremen/Beyeler Foundation, Munich, 2002), Morris Graves: Vision of the Inner-Eye, Braziller, NY(1983) and John Cage: New River Watercolors , Virginia Museum of Fine Art, Richmond,VA (1988), Burton Callicott: A Retrospective – “Sharing a Vision”, Memphis Brooks Museum of Art,Tenn. (1991) and Glenn Berry: Recent Paintings, Humboldt State University, California (1992), and a diary of John Cage's painting workshops in Writings Through John Cage's Music, Poetry and Art, Bernstein and Hatch, University of Chicago Press, 1999

Brief Professional Resume

LINKS

To contact Ray Kass, please email at: raykass@vt.edu