Don Kimes divides his time between Italy, New York and Washington, DC. For decades he has worked extensively in western New York State and Umbria - places he goes to have consecutive thoughts in a world where it is increasingly difficult to have the chance to simply focus. In a 1996 catalogue essay for an exhibition of his work in Munich, he wrote about the relationship between nature and culture saying Italy affords the opportunity to think about culture, nature and the passage of time . . . In the end nature takes everything back. Seven years later a flood destroyed his home and studio. He subsequently wrote about losing much of his life's work: paintings, drawings, most of his photos, filing cabinets full of writing, and more. It felt  like the record of my existence had been erased. Nature took everything back. My work is now based on those destroyed images. Through them color, form and structure combine with nature, time, memory, loss and rebirth. 

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BIO:  

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For more than five decades, Don Kimes has sustained a dual legacy as an accomplished American painter with an international exhibition record, as well as a transformative leader who has helped to shape the visual arts landscape in the United States and Italy. His career has been an extended investigation working through large-scale painting and mixed media. Alongside his studio practice, he has taught, curated, written, built programs, and helped develop arts institutions in the United States and Italy. These activities are not separate from his practice as an artist. Instead they have provided the intellectual, cultural, and human context in which his work as an artist has evolved.

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With over 150 solo and group exhibitions from New York to Singapore; DC to Spain, Italy, Germany and beyond, his work has been presented at the Phillips Collection, Brooklyn Museum, National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Art, Rueda Museum (Madrid), Florence International Biennial and many others, along with decades of representation by several New York City and other galleries. His paintings are held in numerous museum and distinguished private collections. His artistic practice has also moved beyond the conventional gallery and integrated into live performances with full symphony orchestras, opera, theater, and dance companies. Notable collaborations include performances at Chautauqua Institution, Washington Opera Company, and choreography by Martha Graham principal dancer Kevin Keenan in response to Kimes’ 8' x 20' painting Sequences. These interdisciplinary projects reflect a lifelong commitment to expanding painting beyond the confines of the gallery into the public sphere, and have reinforced his belief that painting remains visually and conceptually resonant when placed in dialogue with other forms of cultural expression.

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Kimes began his professional life in New York in the 1970s, studying at the NY Studio School and Brooklyn College while being immersed in the extraordinary community of artists, critics, historians, writers, and musicians surrounding painting at that time. He joined the faculty of the Studio School and taught alongside widely recognized artists and thinkers of several generations, which reinforced his conviction that painting is not a fixed language but is an open field in which tradition, experimentation and uncertainty continually interact. Over time, he became increasingly interested in the physical limits of the painted image and began working with collage, mixed media, constructions, steel, photographic processes, and chemical erosion. These experiments were not an abandonment of painting. They were attempts to discover what remained essential when its conventional assumptions were disrupted. He joined American University in Washington, DC in 1988. During eleven years as visual arts chair, nineteen years leading the studio art program, and 40 years of teaching, he continued painting and exhibiting internationally while transforming their MFA program into one of the university's strongest graduate programs. He brought major artists, critics, curators, and writers into sustained conversation with students, built undergraduate, MFA and artist/scholars residency programs in Rome, Florence and Umbria, and created an environment in which emerging artists could encounter the broader history and contemporary possibilities of their field. His contribution to the cultural life of Umbria was recognized in 2023 by the Cultural Commission of Corciano, Province of Perugia, for enriching the region through his art and opportunities for artists.

 

From 1986 through 2018 he served as Artistic Director in the Visual Arts at the historic Chautauqua Institution. During thirty-three summers, he transformed a modest regional arts program into a nationally recognized center, renovating the Chautauqua School of Art, and creating new museum-quality exhibition spaces, sculpture facilities, and an expanded visual arts lecture series. He also curated and organized exhibitions and public programs with artists, critics, museum directors, writers, and scholars including Robert Storr, Barbara Rose, Donald Kuspit, Judy Pfaff, Jerry Saltz, Stephen Westfall, Barbara Takanega, Louis Grachos, and many others. In 2018 he was named the inaugural Sonkin-Siegal Endowed Chair in the Visual Arts at Chautauqua.

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His work placed him in sustained conversation with the history of American art. He organized exhibitions examining American abstraction from the 1940s through the present and worked with major institutions such as the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, curating exhibitions including artists ranging from Philip Guston, Louise Bourgeois, Jasper Johns, Lee Krasner, Richard Diebenkorn, Beverley Pepper and Cy Twombly to younger generations of contemporary artists. Participating in many symposia further expanded his engagement with the critical and historical questions surrounding contemporary art.

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International experience has been equally formative to his work as a painter. He studied, exhibited, taught, and worked extensively in Mexico, Germany, Spain, and Italy. Italy in particular became a central intellectual and artistic source. Extended periods living and painting in Umbria and Florence brought him into direct contact with Piero della Francesca, Giotto, the walls of Pompeii, and an environment where relationships between art, nature, spirituality, and history are palpable. He lectured and taught at art schools and universities throughout the United States and Europe. He served as the US visual arts representative supported by the Eisenhower Foundation and the United States Information Agency in an exchange to Moscow and Latvia during the late Cold War. These encounters profoundly affected his understanding of art.

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Earlier this year, Kimes received the American University/CAS Award for Exceptional Impact, given to a faculty member who has who has made exceptional contributions to a discipline… a scholar whose work has helped shape a field of knowledge. In her remarks Dean Linda Aldoory described his career as encompassing both an international artistic practice and a sustained institutional contribution to the visual arts. At this point in his career, Kimes sees the strands of his life as an artist, educator, curator, and builder converging in the studio. After fifty years of practice, he says I am less interested in repeating what I have learned than in discovering what remains to be found. His career has ultimately been a continuous effort to respond creatively to change—to transform interruption into possibility, experience into form, and loss into discovery. He brings his accumulated history into the studio and asks, with renewed concentration, the questions that have guided his work from the beginning.​

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