Yeffe Kimball, an Osage Indian artist, will have an exhibition of her work beginning March 1 through April 7 in the Art Gallery of the Department of Interior.
Sponsored by the Center for Arts of Indian America of which Mrs. Stewart L. Udall is president, the show is entitled, “A 30 Year Retrospective of an American Woman Painter.” It is the first one man showing of Indian art to be sponsored by the Center.
Thirty-five Kimball paintings are included in the show, progressing through several periods from her student works to present day, famous “Space Concepts." It covers the years from 1935 to 1965 and includes drawings, collages, paintings and sculpture-paintings that show the tremendous versatility of this Oklahoma artist, born in the small town of Mountain Park.
The exhibition has been shown in museums from coast to coast and will be retired after its run at Interior. Other Kimball works have been exhibited in Athens, London, Paris, Brussels and Edinburgh.
Miss Kimball has a reputation as an innovator in the use of acrylic resins and sculpture-painting. The sculptured forms and surfaces reflect a deep appreciation of the phenomena of nature, here, an abyss of a moon crater; over there the image of a red-hot star burning in space; elsewhere, the mystery of the cold outer planets.
Titles relating to astronomical phenomena dot the showing. “Solar Aurorae,” “Cepheid Cluster” "Eridames Spiral” and “Pluto" are some of the paintings executed with resin, the pigment being applied pure with various tools including the brush and sponge. The purity of the resultant color is a major distinction of this part of the exhibition, particularly the cool blues, the blazing oranges, reds and occasional sunny yellows.
Some of her paintings of animals, for example, represent a sophisticated development of primitive Indian paintings. In some, she uses early Indian art in a manner not unlike that in which European artists have drawn from primitive African sculpture.
She is currently commissioned to do one of her space paintings for NASA at the Apollo Launch Center at Cape Kennedy which will be placed in the permanent collection of the Space Gallery Smithsonian.
Yeffe Kimball’s painting is grounded by years of training at the Art Students’ League, New York, and additional work and study in Paris and throughout France and Italy. She has not associated herself with any particular art movement. Since her first one-man show in New York in 1946, her paintings have been acquired by museums, including the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Dayton Art Institute, Portland Art Museum, Chrysler Art Museum, Baltimore Art Museum, the Philbrook Museum in Tulsa, Mattatuck Museum, Conn., Washington Lee University, Va., the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the Art and Crafts Department of Interior, in addition to numerous private collections.
Hours for the Interior Department showing will be from 10:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m., Monday through Friday.
