ABOUT
Ed Kerns is an American painter and educator. He studied with Grace Hartigan, the highly regarded American Abstract Expressionist. Through his friendship with Hartigan, Kerns came to know and work for many artists of the New York School, including Willem de Kooning, James Brooks, Philip Guston, Clyfford Still, and Sam Francis. Kerns’ career in New York had a meteoric trajectory. In 1972, his first exhibition at the Sachs Gallery on 57th Street in Manhattan garnered high critical praise. The New York Times, The Village Voice, Arts Magazine, ArtForum , and Artnews were among the numerous publications to praise his work. Kerns lived and exhibited in Manhattan for 12 years before coming to Lafayette College to chair and build the modern era Art Department. In 1987, Kerns was awarded the Eugene and Mildred Clapp Professorship of Art. He became the youngest person to hold an endowed chair in the College’s history. Kerns has enjoyed a long association with the New York galleries of A.M. Sachs, Rosa Esman, Florence Lynch, and Howard Scott. His career has spanned a prolific 45 years. Kerns’ work has been shown in over 38 solo exhibitions and 130 group shows in New York, Paris, San Francisco, Washington D.C., Chicago, Denver, Rome, Madrid, Osaka, Munich, and Mexico City. In addition to painting and production of digital art, Kerns routinely collaborates with neuroscientists, biologists, computer scientists, and engineers. He is part of a growing group of artists and academics who embrace the emergent possibilities of consilience forming a broad partnership to explore the over-arching unity of knowledge. The visual ideas found in The Octopus Meditations have been developed from conversations with biologists, neuroscientists, and other artists interested in the compelling revelations made possible by process-driven visual-modeling and direct observation, the root of both art and science. To ask questions about consciousness especially in the context of a magnificent creature with an integrated neural network of nine brains places imagination and creativity at the forefront of progress in scientific and artistic endeavor.