Irwin Kremen

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Irwin Kremen (born 1925) is a North Carolina artist and professor emeritus at Duke University.

His artwork mainly consists of abstract collages, often composed from pieces of weathered paper he gathered during his travels. Early on, he worked on a small scale, producing collages no larger than his hand. He invented his own method of affixing the disparate pieces with paper hinges - not the traditional glue of other collage artists. Kremen's sculptures are composed of iron, saw blades and steel, among other materials. Kremen’s work has been shown in more than 30 venues at museums and contemporary art centers nationally and abroad.

1 Early life
2 Important Shows
3 References
4 External links

[edit] Early life

In the 1940s, Kremen took literature classes from poet M.C. Richards at the renowned Black Mountain College, a progressive liberal arts school founded in 1933 near Asheville, N.C. He worked as a journalist in Chicago, then lived for eight years in Greenwich Village where he wrote, read and worked in publishing, visited museums and followed avant-garde movements. In New York, in 1951, he met Black Mountain artists John Cage, Merce Cunningham and David Tudor. Cage dedicated his work for the piano, “4 minutes 33 seconds,” also known as his “silent piece,” to Kremen.

Later, Kremen earned a Ph.D. in clinical psychology at Harvard University. In 1963, he brought his wife and two children to Durham, joining the faculty in Duke’s psychology department. He made his first work of art three years later, after encouragement from his friend M.C. Richards.

[edit] Important Shows

In 1979, Kremen, then 54, made his mark on the national art scene with a solo exhibition at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Collection of Fine Arts (now the Smithsonian American Art Museum). Twenty one-man shows and 16 group shows followed. He retired from Duke in 1992 and continues to make art.

In the spring of 2007, the Nasher Museum of Art presented Kremen’s first retrospective was at the Nasher Museum of Art included more than 160 works – collage, painting and sculpture – spanning each of the 40 years of Kremen’s art-making since he began at age 41.^[1]