South Central Chapter ConferenceSpeakers

Kent Rush

Friday, October 13, 2017 @ 9:00am, Room 149

Panel Talk: Photographs in Printers Ink

Kent Rush was born in Hayward, California (the "East Bay" of the San Francisco Bay Area) in 1948. He spent his formative years absorbing the artistic, intellectual and political milieu of the Bay Area of the late 60's. He studied art, drawing, and printmaking, at the then California College of Arts and Crafts (CCAC) with Robert Bechtle, Charles Gill and Jeryl Parker receiving his BFA in 1970 amid the tumult of People's Park and the Berkeley Viet Nam Moratorium.

In the mid 70's he earned a Masters Degree at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque where he studied art and lithography under Garo Antreasian while he also worked as a printer's assistant and photographer for the Tamarind Institute of Lithography. Shortly after that, he moved to San Antonio, Texas to start up the printmaking program for the then San Antonio Art Institute,1976. While teaching and working there, he completed an MFA Degree at the University of Texas at Austin in 1979. He moved back to California that year where he set up his studio and began showing at Art Space Gallery in Los Angeles. He then taught at the California College of Arts and Crafts ('80-'81) and the San Francisco Art Institute (Spring '82) and began also showing at the Bluxume Gallery, San Francisco.

Rush returned to San Antonio in 1982 where he has spent the past 27 years making art and teaching at the University of Texas at San Antonio. His work has been exhibited extensively in the United States in solo, two and three person and group and competitive shows. Internationally he has also shown in London, Brazil, Peru, Mexico, and France.

Coming from a background in printmaking, drawing and painting Rush, over the past 20 years, has appropriated photography as a means of making images. Specifically, he collects (on film) mundane objects and surfaces (primarily concrete) from urban and suburban sites and presents them in a monumental format.