Reuben Kadish at the Staller Center for the Arts – 1992

The following video documents the exhibition “Reuben Kadish” held at the University Art Gallery, Staller Center for the Arts at the State University of New York at Stony Brook from June 10 to August 1, 1992.

The exhibition was curated by Mel Pekarsky, an artist and tenured art professor at Stony Brook.

The original videographer of this document is Julie Larson, who was then an MFA candidate in sculpture at Stony Brook.

The survey style exhibition included essays by the esteemed art critic Dore Ashton and the painter Herman Cherry, a life-long friend of the artist.

“The energies emanating form the whole process,” wrote Ashton on the array of terra cotta works, “—pulling, pounding, scoring, and shaping the clay, bringing it to permanence in the fire, altering and directing the way light will do its sculpturing part in patinas—are subsumed by the meaning of the massive object which is not renderable in words, words, words but stands there.”

The exhibition and this retrieved and reformatted video are a fitting farewell to the artist who died a month after the exhibition closed at age 78 in New York City.