Alumni
On the occasion of the College’s 60th Anniversary, our department is pleased to recognize the accomplishments of Ken Dawson Little and invite him to join our family of distinguished alums.
Ken graduated from our department in 1972 with an MFA in Art, and he pushed way beyond the preconceived ideas about ceramics then current in university ceramics programs.
Since then this talented artist has sought to answer a question he wants to explore as opposed to a statement that he wants to make and has developed his repertoire during a fertile period of modern art when movements flourished, succeeded, overlapped. At the same time he found common creative ground in the ideas and styles of musicians and vocal artists. Ken Little’s reputation derives from his adaptation of material culture or pop culture to express his ideas—or as he terms them: obsessions—first w/ large-scale ceramic sculptures and then starting about 1980 with a broad range of mixed media: cast iron, bronze, neon, Bible pages, shoes, charcoal briquettes, and dollar bills.
His commitment to making and exhibiting art has generated a national profile that includes more than 35 one-person exhibitions and more than 200 group exhibitions. Ken’s list of awards runs several paragraphs incl. grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Mid America Art Alliance, the John M. Kohler Arts Center, and the Penny McCall Foundation.
During a retrospective exhibition that traveled for 2 years around the western half of the US, Ken Little was interviewed for Sculpture magazine where he reflected on his work and his process. The article brought out another motive behind Ken’s work: the imperative of dialogue with peers in the art community.
While earning his many awards he directed Rose Amarillo, an alternative exhibition space for local and national artists, served on the board of the Blue Star Art Space—both in San Antonio, and continues to be a strong advocate for contemporary art.
He is no stranger to the academy either and has taught students from Florida to Texas; he’s been at the University of Texas at San Antonio since 1988.
His work—especially the steel armatures coated in real dollar bills (which by the way is cheaper than casting the piece in bronze)—has entered our visual lexicon and has been collected by institutions across the country incl. the Contemporary Museum in Honolulu, Nelson Gallery at the University of California at Davis, and Microsoft Corporation in Seattle. Our UMFA owns four of his works, and his 1984 “Wrinkle”, incorporating a taxidermy form of an antelope, is currently displayed with four other artists’ works in their education gallery.
Finally, Ken Little has been the subject of two monographs that stamp his work as a valuable contribution to visual culture.
We are proud to honor Mr. Ken Little as our 2009 Distinguished Alumnus.