Paul Joseph Kos (born December 23, 1942) is an American conceptual artist and educator, he is one of the founders of the Bay Area Conceptual Art movement in

California California is a state in the Western United States, located along the Pacific Coast. With nearly 39.2million residents across a total area of approximately , it is the most populous U.S. state and the 3rd largest by area. It is also the m ...

. Kos incorporates video, sound and interactivity into his sculptural installations. Currently Kos lives and works in San Francisco.

Biography

Paul Kos was born December 23, 1942 in Rock Springs,

Wyoming Wyoming () is a state in the Mountain West subregion of the Western United States. It is bordered by Montana to the north and northwest, South Dakota and Nebraska to the east, Idaho to the west, Utah to the southwest, and Colorado to t ...

, to parents Bertha Kos and small-town doctor Paul A. Kos. He moved from

San Francisco San Francisco (; Spanish for " Saint Francis"), officially the City and County of San Francisco, is the commercial, financial, and cultural center of Northern California. The city proper is the fourth most populous in California and 17t ...

in the early 1960s. He received both his B.F.A degree in 1965 and M.F.A degree in 1967 from the

San Francisco Art Institute San Francisco Art Institute (SFAI) was a private college of contemporary art in San Francisco, California. Founded in 1871, SFAI was one of the oldest art schools in the United States and the oldest west of the Mississippi River. Approximately ...

. In 1969,

Tom Marioni Tom Marioni (born 1937, Cincinnati, Ohio, United States) is an American artist and educator, known for his conceptual artwork. Marioni was active in the emergence of Conceptual Art movement in the 1960s. He founded the Museum of Conceptual Art ...

organized and curated Paul Kos' first solo exhibition, ''Participationkinetics,'' at the

Richmond Art Center Richmond Art Center is a nonprofit arts organization based in Richmond, California, founded in 1936. History In 1936, Richmond-resident Hazel Salmi began teaching classes under the Emergency Education Program (EEP) of the Works Progress Adminis ...

. Kos taught at San Francisco Art Institute for 30 years, starting in 1978 and he was influential in the development of the New Genres Department (previously named the Performance/Video Department). Besides his studio practice, Kos has made large scale public art installations including: Poetry Sculpture Garden with Poet Laureate, Bob Hass, at 199 Fremont Street, San Francisco and “Every thing matters” for the J. Michael Bishop Collection at the UCSF Mission Bay Campus. The first major retrospective of his work “Everything Matters” (2003) was held at the

Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive The Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA, formerly abbreviated as BAM/PFA) are a combined art museum, repertory movie theater, and archive associated with the University of California, Berkeley. Lawrence Rinder was Director from ...

. A second major survey of the artist's work, "Equilibrium: A Paul Kos Survey" (2016) was held at di Rosa Center for Contemporary Art in Napa.

Collections

His work is included in many public museum collections including

Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego The Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego (or MCASD), in San Diego, California, US, is an art museum focused on the collection, preservation, exhibition, and interpretation of works of art from 1950 to the present. Mission The stated mission of ...

Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, often referred to as The Guggenheim, is an art museum at 1071 Fifth Avenue on the corner of East 89th Street on the Upper East Side of Manhattan in New York City. It is the permanent home of a continuously exp ...

Museum of Modern Art The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) is an art museum located in Midtown Manhattan, New York City, on 53rd Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. It plays a major role in developing and collecting modern art, and is often identified as one of t ...

(MoMA),

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) is a modern and contemporary art museum located in San Francisco, California. A nonprofit organization, SFMOMA holds an internationally recognized collection of modern and contemporary art, and was ...

De Saisset Museum The de Saisset Museum at Santa Clara University opened in 1955, after Isabel de Saisset, the last member of a California pioneer family bequeathed her estate to the University of Santa Clara. The museum owns nearly 10,000 art pieces and historical ...

at Santa Clara University, Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art at Utah State University,

Stedelijk Museum The Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam (; Municipal Museum Amsterdam), colloquially known as the Stedelijk, is a museum for modern art, contemporary art, and design located in Amsterdam, Netherlands.

Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth (widely referred to as The Modern) is an art museum of post-World War II art in Fort Worth, Texas with a collection of international modern and contemporary art. Founded in 1892, The Modern is located in the c ...

, Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia,

Everson Museum of Art Everson may refer to: People with the surname * Ben Everson (born 1987), English footballer * Bill Everson (1906–1966), Welsh international rugby union player * Cliff Everson, a New Zealand car designer and manufacturer * Corinna Everson (born ...

Long Beach Museum of Art The Long Beach Museum of Art is a museum located on Ocean Boulevard in the Bluff Park neighborhood of Long Beach, California, United States. The museum's permanent collection includes over 4,000 paintings, drawings, sculptures, works on paper, an ...

, Wallraf-Richartz Museum,

Auckland Art Gallery Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki is the principal public gallery in Auckland, New Zealand. It has the most extensive collection of national and international art in New Zealand and frequently hosts travelling international exhibitions. Set be ...

, di Rosa Center for Contemporary Art, amongst others.

Awards

Kos is the recipient of numerous awards, including Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Fellowship (1985);

John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation fellowship Guggenheim Fellowships are grants that have been awarded annually since by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation to those "who have demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the ar ...

in video and audio (1990); multiple National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) fellowships; and Flintridge Foundation Fellowship award (1999). Kos held the Dodd Chair at the

University of Georgia , mottoeng = "To teach, to serve, and to inquire into the nature of things.""To serve" was later added to the motto without changing the seal; the Latin motto directly translates as "To teach and to inquire into the nature of things." , establ ...

Work

In the mid-1960s he worked on abstract fiberglass sculptures, but he then turned away from those to more site-specific art. During the 1970s Kos collaborated with his former wife Marlene Kos, together they produced numerous videos and installations. His work has a strong connection to the natural world and often has a religious dimension. He does not limit himself to one type of media, because his work is conceptual he will often pick the medium to best suit the concept. He will often hire people to help with the technical aspects of the work, if need be. He agrees to technological updates to his work (such as older video work) if they are needed, as long as the sensibility and feeling remains the same.

''The Sound of the Ice Melting'' (1970)

A conceptual art piece, first produced in 1970. The work includes 10 boom microphones plugged into an active sound system recorded the sound of 25 pound blocks of ice melting in a metal pan on the floor. The photographic image of the installation has an absurdity about it. It asks the question, "what does ice sound like as it melts?"

''Chartres Bleu'' (1982–1986)

This piece is a video work, represents a full-scale recreation of a stained-glass

stained glass Stained glass is coloured glass as a material or works created from it. Throughout its thousand-year history, the term has been applied almost exclusively to the windows of churches and other significant religious buildings. Although tradition ...

windows in

Chartres Cathedral Chartres Cathedral, also known as the Cathedral of Our Lady of Chartres (french: Cathédrale Notre-Dame de Chartres), is a Roman Catholic church in Chartres, France, about southwest of Paris, and is the seat of the Bishop of Chartres. Mostly con ...

. Twenty seven monitors, vertically stacked show the glass panels of the famous church over a period of twenty four hours, condensed into twelve minutes. Readability of represented narrative scenes changes, depending on the changes of the light. The work is permanently on view at di Rosa Center for Contemporary Art in Napa.

''Sand Piece'' (1971)

A two-story gallery was transformed into an hourglass shape of sand. A ton of sand that was placed on the upper floor was sifting through a minute hole to the lower level, in the shape of a perfect cone.

rEvolution: Notes for the Invasion: mar mar march (1972–1973)

Video installation work, the viewer must walk around narrow planks of wood to see a monitor that shows a small figure marching above typewriter keys that spell out, "mar mar march". Interesting correlation between the fiction and the reality and mechanical regularity of little man's steps and disposition of wooden planks. This video work has a satire element, mocking militant nationalism with the marching sounds.

''Tower of Babel'' (1989)

Tower of Babel was created in 1989 and is an 20‐channel video installation, with a large, spiral‐ shaped metal armature (

Vladimir Tatlin Vladimir Yevgrafovich Tatlin ( – 31 May 1953) was a Russian and Soviet painter, architect and stage-designer. Tatlin achieved fame as the architect who designed The Monument to the Third International, more commonly known as Tatlin's Tower, wh ...

–inspired) the supported the monitors. On the monitors are 75 different people speaking in 50 different languages. Cacophony seems indecipherable, unless a viewer comes closer to individual monitors. The work criticizes divisions between different cultures and advocates international understanding. This piece is inspired by a Biblical story of the

Tower of Babel The Tower of Babel ( he, , ''Mīgdal Bāḇel'') narrative in Genesis 11:1–9 is an origin myth meant to explain why the world's peoples speak different languages. According to the story, a united human race speaking a single language and mi ...

in which people used to speak only one language before they became too ambitious and tried to build a tower to the heavens, God made them speak different languages so that they could not understand each other.

''Pawn'' (1991)

The work Pawn was completed in 1991, and featured 2,500 plastic magnetic chess pieces, steel panel on the wall, and wood. The steel panel is on the wall, with the magnetic red chess (kings, queens, knights, bishops and castles) pieces forming the shape of a single chess pawn. These pieces don't mimic pawn's symmetry but the illusion of light and shadow in bright red. This work is a metaphor for the relations between the world's powerful and the powerless. The red pawn also presents a metaphor for life under

Communism Communism (from Latin la, communis, lit=common, universal, label=none) is a far-left sociopolitical, philosophical, and economic ideology and current within the socialist movement whose goal is the establishment of a communist society, ...

Filmography

Bibliography

Books

* *

References

External links

Official website

Professor Emeritus profile, New Genres department
from San Francisco Art Institute
Paul Kos on ArtNet
{{DEFAULTSORT:Kos, Paul American conceptual artists Living people American sculptors Artists from Wyoming Artists from San Francisco San Francisco Art Institute faculty San Francisco Art Institute alumni People from Rock Springs, Wyoming 1942 births