Till final yr I believed my father, Samuel Kahn (1927-2007), had largely wasted his life. However as I tremblingly sort this essay, I’m headed to a Virginia museum displaying a roomful of his psychedelically vibrant, unselfconscious, off-kilter, long-forgotten artworks that, it seems, make individuals joyful.
The exhibition Samuel Kahn, Ph.D. + Mates opens on 29 January at Previous Dominion College in Norfolk, Virginia, in its Gordon Artwork Galleries. It options round 50 of Dad’s wood-carvings, work and sketches. In intense hues—he had no artwork coaching and by no means realized to combine paint—amoebas drip over kaleidoscopic cats gamboling on housetops. Mermaids sprout weathervanes. Fish spin on pedestals. Bushes resemble mind lobes.
Dad’s titles are simply as enigmatic: Two Mates in Tow + Cloudburst (round 2003), Trials & Tributaries on the Rocky Highway to Birdland (1997). He rigorously labelled some parts—gray triangles are “Canyon-Like Hills”, a snaking white streak flecked in black is “Sandy Particles Frozen River”—as he tried to impose order on a world made incomprehensible by his failing psychological well being.
Samuel Kahn’s Two Mates in Tow + Cloudburst (round 2003) Courtesy Previous Dominion College Gordon Artwork Galleries, Norfolk, Virginia
Jasper Waugh-Quasebarth, the present’s curator and the Gordon Artwork Galleries’ director, describes Dad’s work as radiant, prismatic and “grounded in earthy, pure supplies”. Waugh-Quasebarth and different students have even in contrast Sam Kahn to Peter Max, Grandma Moses, Marc Chagall and the Cubists. Dad knew a bit of about these luminaries, since my mom Renée Kahn was an artwork instructor, historian and artist in her personal proper. However Dad emphasised his art-world outsider standing by including “Ph.D.” to his works’ signatures—referring to his Columbia College doctorate in scientific psychology specialising in kids, which did him little skilled good.
He was a Montreal native, whose Lithuanian Jewish immigrant household ran outfitters. In 1957, whereas ending his research at Columbia, he married Renée—a Bronx-born, Metropolis Faculty-educated daughter of Ukrainian Jewish immigrants. Within the Sixties, with three kids in tow (me and my older brothers, Andrew and Ned), my mother and father settled into an outdated farmhouse in Stamford, Connecticut, the place my dad labored at kids’s clinics. He was tall, athletic and hearty-looking however beset by bipolar melancholy. Rounds of electroshock therapies left him frail, befogged and ultimately unemployable. I believed, by age 4, that demons possessed my father.
As our financial savings ran out, Dad discovered solace in tending the farmhouse and its grounds, with oaks and maples shading magnolias, roses, peonies and phlox. My mom eked out a residing by instructing and consulting within the artwork and structure world. She painted prolifically in her free time, impressed by the German Expressionists—particularly George Grosz. In her signature works, neon indicators glow amid tableaux of caricatured gangsters, corrupt politicians, strippers and gossipy housewives.
Samuel Kahn’s Untitled (2006) Courtesy Previous Dominion College Gordon Artwork Galleries, Norfolk, Virginia
My mom’s pursuits laid some groundwork for my very own profession. For the reason that Eighties, I’ve written about artwork and structure for publications together with The New York Instances. My brother Ned, in the meantime, grew to become a sculptor—the exhibition on the Gordon Artwork Galleries consists of his and Renée’s works as nicely.
Round 1990, Dad began experimenting with my mom’s paints. On giant picket panels, he floated photos of wildlife over Stamford streetscapes and—why not?—dangled apples from a basketball hoop. He saved scrapbooks of clipart that impressed him, together with John James Audubon’s chicken prints. As his more and more violent temper swings alienated everybody besides Renée, my Dad compulsively sketched whirling amoebas—he felt it was his calling, and a method to join with family members.
After he died, his gathered works solely worsened our grief. My art-world contacts recommended donating them to a museum. Previous Dominion accepted the cumbersome present as a favour to their galleries’ endowers, Baron and Ellin Gordon (my husband’s cousins). We tucked away just a few carvings—a winged horse, a spinning fish—however largely forgot about Dad’s obsession.
Samuel Kahn’s Pegasus Flying Dwelling (round 1995) Courtesy Previous Dominion College Gordon Artwork Galleries, Norfolk, Virginia
In late 2024, when my mom bought the farmhouse and moved into assisted residing, I acquired an e mail from Waugh-Quasebarth out of the blue. The artwork of Samuel Kahn, Ph.D., with its “flowing traces and vivid colors”, had been rediscovered in storage, and he was planning a present together with associated items by famend artists like Dale Chihuly.
I puzzled at first how I may bear having Dad’s work spotlighted, given all my childhood scars. I might by no means have predicted that, by 2026, I may write this reflection and inform individuals: “Right here’s some excellent news in these principally horrible instances: I’m not mad at my dad anymore. His artwork is bringing pleasure.”
To tell Waugh-Quasebarth’s exhibition labels, I cathartically pored over household papers. I discovered materials I had forgotten or by no means seen: an early Sixties picture of assured Dad analysing a toddler’s drawing of a gabled home, his Audubon scrapbook, his Nineties self-published ebook about appreciating bushes titled Barks That Don’t Chew. When Waugh-Quasebarth got here to our Manhattan condominium to choose up our exhibition loans, I took notes for this text as he reminisced about feeling “simply captivated and curious” on the first sight of Dad’s artwork.
A dozen supportive mates and relations are becoming a member of me for the opening on the Gordon Artwork Galleries, as throngs of strangers puzzle over Two Mates in Tow and Cloudburst. Again at our condominium, I’ve already begun to overlook the winged horse and spinning fish.
Samuel Kahn, Ph.D. + Mates, Gordon Artwork Galleries, Previous Dominion College, Norfolk, Virginia, 30 January-16 Might
