The Kansas City Star
Sunday, february 10, 1980
art talk: Printmaker's Focus Hard to Pin Down
by Donald Hoffman, Art and Architecture Critic
[above the text of the article: a reproduction of Segan's 1976 etching "America, America, Sing Me the Song of the George Washington Bridge" The caption]: Etching by Ken Akiva Segan, at the Batman Gallery
The first thing that's apparent about the work of Ken Akiva Segan, which is being exhibited through Feb. 23 at the Donald Batman Gallery, 825 Westport Road, is that Segan really knows what he's doing as far as printmaking goes.
Born in 1950 in New York and trained at a variety of schools, including the Art Students' League in New York and Washington University in St. Louis, Segan lives in Columbia. He is showing etchings, hand-colored etchings, linocuts and a drypoint.
Apart from his technical skill, though, I am bothered by his radical shifts in feeling. The intensely and disturbing figures of such prints as "Dreams of the Faith" (No. 12) and "The Law is the Eyes" (No. 13) don't seem to have come from the same artist who does more brittle and decorative sort of work seen in such prints as "American, America..." (No. 9) and "Construction" (No. 21).
Many of his larger prints rely on a dense tapestry of details in which the whole becomes lost in the parts. A fine exception is "Genesis I" (No. 19), in which the detail is put in service of a central image of organic growth expressed through a brilliantly subtle range of tonal values.
No.34 and No. 36 demonstrate Segan's ability to create strong black and white block prints, and the linocut called "The Cafeteria" (No. 42) is an exuberant essay in polyphonic color.