Jerry Kunkel

A life-long collector, Jerry Kunkel is well known for his paintings loaded with images that trigger our cultural memory and collective consciousness, all mined from his collections. He considered the process of collecting to be transformative and, lucky for us, his paintings make that transformation visible for us to see.

When Kunkel moved his studio from Colorado to Lawrence, Kansas, he was faced quite literally with unpacking his life. This began a long process of attempting to unpack imagery, unravel it, unlayer it, isolate it, and spread it out. Resonating with references to pop culture, everyday activities, the unexplained curious twist, the symbolic and the everyday, Kunkel’s paintings spread out imagery, pattern, and text luxuriously revealing unexpected stories intertwined with nuance and meaning. Jerry wanted us to “remember everything and nothing at once, to cross-reference the past and the present, to be self-reflective, to consider the mundane and the sublime in a single breath, to reconsider our cultural conventions, to acknowledge our excesses, and to juxtapose what we believe to be true with what we may still need to learn.”

Jerry Kunkel (1944-2023) began teaching at the University of Colorado at Boulder in 1969. He was Chair of the Department of Art and Art History (UCB) from 1978 –1993 and Interim Director of the Film Studies Program from 1993-95, retiring as emeritus professor of Fine Arts in 2006. He relocated to Lawrence, KS where he maintained an active studio practice until his death in 2023 at the age of 78.

Jerry Kunkel was awarded a solo exhibition at the Denver Art Museum in 1974 and exhibited nationally in such venues as the Chicago Art Institute, IL, San Francisco Museum of Fine Arts, CA, Whitney Museum of American Art, NY, NY, and numerous others. Jerry Kunkel’s paintings are held in the public collections of the Denver Art Museum, CO; Anderson Ranch Arts Center, CO; Southern Illinois University Carbondale, IL; Kirkland Museum, Denver, CO; Sun Valley Center for the Arts and Humanities, ID; Aurora Campus Library, Denver, CO; Kaiser Permanente; Amoco, Inc; Anaconda Corporation; and others including numerous private collections