by Adam Bateman

One of the most significant movements in contemporary art world-wide is one where artists explore their identities. This exploration of identity is often done on a cultural level, sometimes in the context of gender or sexual orientation, and often about Art Historical identity. The best artists explore their identity on all of these levels. Such is the art of Salt Lake artist, Annie Kennedy.

Kennedy “discovered” art as a senior at West High School where she was a student of local artist Steve Case. As a student of Case, she discovered abstraction for the first time. A daughter of a Salt Lake City lawyer, she had always intended to be a lawyer herself, but had considered landscape painting a form of release. Upon discovering abstraction, she finally changed her course to develop into a significant artist.

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by Jean Arnold

Sometimes life is stranger than fiction; something happens in our lives that we never could have imagined beforehand. In 2000, when I first met my cousin, Lee Worden, at a mutual cousin’s wedding, I knew little about his father, Adam, nor Adam’s partner Bhavani, or their children Lee and Anandi. I had heard the family had an herbal business in California, and that Adam was a very quiet, withdrawn man, but little else. I was excited to finally meet Lee, and to learn more about this part of the family. Being a professional artist myself, I was shocked and thrilled to find out that my uncle Adam had been a Beat Generation collage artist. Lee showed me a few fuzzy photos of his father’s collages, and gave a web address where he had posted some of the collages. I felt saddened that I would never meet my uncle, who had died the previous year.

On visiting the website, I was enchanted by the works’ gentle poetry, humor, and rich blend of patterns and materials. I saw that my uncle had a thorough grasp of collage, a sophisticated visual vocabulary, and a highly personal voice. Lee told me that Adam had been a self-taught artist; to educate himself he visited gallery and museum exhibits regularly and subscribed to art magazines. I knew I wanted to travel to San Francisco to meet my other cousin, Anandi, to see the work first hand, and to learn more about my uncle the artist.

In November 2002, I made the trip to San Francisco. On a sunny, still day Lee, Anandi and I pulled the boxes out of the storage unit onto the asphalt outside. Collage after collage, I was astonished at the work I saw. His juxtapositions of humor and tragedy, macro and micro, sacred and mundane, Eastern and Western – in striking compositions, colors, and spatial shifts – were genius. I saw that Adam did all this using scraps from everyday life such as comic books, wallpaper, candy wrappers, fireworks posters, paperback covers, and magazines.

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