Kenneth Snelson
Birth Date: June 29, 1927
Death Date: December 22, 2016
Artist Gallery
Kenneth Duane Snelson was born in 1927, in Pendleton, Oregon. His father, Jack, who was in the laundry business, opened a camera shop when his son was 6. His mother, the former Mildred Unger, was a homemaker. Kenneth Snelson was a painting student at Black Mountain College in North Carolina in the late 1940s when he became enchanted by the lectures on geometric forms delivered by a last-minute substitute teacher, R. Buckminster Fuller, the futurist inventor and father of the geodesic dome. In 1964 the New York World’s Fair provided him with a big commission. Mr. Snelson created a huge sculpture, “Photonium,” measuring 30 by 35 feet that hung overhead in the pavilion’s Court of Light, near the entrance. He began exhibiting at the Dwan Gallery in Manhattan, an important showcase for Minimalism, where he had his first solo show, in 1966. That same year his work was included in the Sculpture Annual at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Snelson became a sculptor who stitched together aluminum tubes with flexible stainless-steel wires to create seemingly lighter-than-air towers, arcs and cantilevers. In 1972 he married Katherine Kaufmann. Delicate and airy, Snelson’s creations assumed a bewildering variety of guises. They hugged the ground, lizard like, stretched horizontally from the sides of buildings, exploded outward like frozen pick-up sticks or rose vertiginously skyward, like the 60-foot-tall “Needle Tower” (1968) at the Hirshhorn Museum or the “Needle Tower II” (1968) at the Sculpture Garden in Washington. “While forfeiting mobility, I managed to gain something even more exotic: solid elements fixed in space, one-to-another, held together only by tension members”, he wrote in a letter published in the International Journal of Space Structures in 1990. I was quite amazed at what I had done. In his later work, Snelson elaborated on his atomic structures using digital imagery, which allowed him to summon forth complex, intertwined forms bordering on the fantastical. He also returned to photography, using vintage cameras to take panoramic images of streets and neighborhoods in New York, Venice and Paris. Snelson died in 2016 from prostate cancer, he was 89.