Ken Tisa: The Color of Sound: AF Projects, Los Angeles
Ken Tisa is one of the most important artists living today to emerge from the downtown artistic community of New York City in the early 1970’s. He is best known for his brilliant beaded textile wall-hangings and his incredible paintings that have an indefatigable attention to detail. His work is historically significant not only in itself as artworks but in its influence on a wide-assortment of well-known artists and writers over the past 6 decades.
Tisa was born in 1945 in Philadelphia, PA. He moved to New York City as a teenager in the late 1960’s to attend Pratt University (MFA, 1968) and then went on to study at the Yale School of Art and Architecture, where he studied with Robert Ferris Thompson, receiving an MFA in 1971.
Tisa was known and admired for his exuberantly colored and cartoon-like figurative paintings in New York in the late 1960’s, associating with other young downtown artists like Keith Haring. When at Yale, Tisa discovered beading and expanded his work in the studio to focus on large-scale, intricately sewn wall-hangings made of fabric, beads and buttons. He received a Fulbright grant to study Haitian bead work in Haiti, and also received a Yale grant to New Orleans in 1970 where he collected thousands of glass beads during the weeks surrounding Mardi Gras, bringing them back to New Haven and New York. These beads became the primary material used in all of his beaded pieces from 1970 until the present.
In the early 1970’s, Tisa also traveled to San Francisco to experience the psychedelic gay culture of the Cockettes. He returned to New York in 1973 and was included in the 1975 Whitney Biennial, exhibiting two large beaded wall works. While back in New York City, he held several solo exhibitions of his beaded works and realized several experimental projects with the writers and performers Kenward Elmslie and Max Blagg. His project with Blagg, Hotel Firbank Archive was presented at MoMA PS1 in 1980.
Throughout the early 1980's, Tisa continued to take regular yearly trips to Haiti and the Dominican Republic where he collaborated with a local Gaga group, creating ritualistic objects. In the mid 1980's, Tisa had several solo shows in New York including a 2-person collaboration with David Hammonds in the Sara Penn clothing and fabric store Knobkerry. After participating in the seminal exhibition “Witnesses Against Our Vanishing” in 1989 at Artist’s Space, curated by David Wojnarovic and Nan Goldin, Tisa withdrew from exhibiting new work during the AIDS epidemic. At the urging of his partner, the poet Bill Jakobson, Tisa focused instead on teaching, becoming a professor at Maryland Institute College of the Art in Baltimore, MD. From 1999-2007, Tisa lived in France and collaborated with the master ceramist, Vincent Buffile.
Tisa began actively exhibiting his work again in 2013 at Kate Werble Gallery, in New York City. His first solo show was organized by a former student, Matthew Ronay. Ronay and Tisa presented all of Tisa’s ceramic works between 1999-2007 alongside new paintings on canvas. Tisa then went on to show paintings, works on paper and objects from his various collections. His first exhibition of beaded works in four decades will open on March 15th at Kate Werble.
Over the past 50 years, Tisa’s work has been featured in exhibitions at institutions such as the Philadelphia Museum of Art, (Philadelphia, PA); La Salle University Art Museum (Philadelphia, PA); the Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College (Saratoga, NY); The Philbrook Museum of Art (Tulsa, OK); MoMA PS1 (Long Island City, NY); Artist’s Space (New York, NY); Art in General (New York, NY); Gray Gallery (New York, NY); and PS122 Gallery (New York, NY); and the Whitney Museum of American Art (New York, NY).
