The Columbia Missourian
Friday, July 25, 1980 - page 5B
Art
One-man show: Kenneth Segan’s award-winning art features mixed media prints
by Maura Fritz, Missourian staff writer
Artist Ken Segan's work has gotten more exposure in the past year than it has in the last five years.'
The 30 year old Master of Fine Arts candidate, whose thesis work exhibit opens Sunday in the university Fine Art gallery, has received wide recognition lately for his prints, etchings and mixed media works.
"It's not usual for a graduate student in the Midwest to have as much success - setting into galleries and one-man shows - as Ken has had," Frank Stack, a professor in the University's art department, says.
Since early 1979, Segan's work has become part of seven permanent collections, was accepted in four national exhibitions and two regional exhibitions, was displayed in three one-man shows and three group exhibits, and was accepted for representation by six art galleries.
Segan also has two works which are part of an invitational travelling exhibit. One, a print entitled "The Law is the Eyes...," will be donated to the Minnesota Museum of Art, pending a review by a museum board. The other work, "The Prisoner," which Segan describes as a "one- of-a-kind mixed media on paper," won an award in the "West '80 - Art and the Law" juried competitive national exhibition and will become part of a permanent collection of the exhibit's sponsor.
Segan will exhibit 31 works in his thesis show, which runs through Aug. 8.Of these, five or six are mixed media works, a combination of watercolors, etchings, linoleum, pen and ink, or variations of such. Others are etchings or prints.
Some of the work is based on architectural themes. They are more structural in their images, Segan says. A few deal with social or political themes. There are a number of works that deal with the experience of dreams, and a couple that deal with Judaism. Then there are subjects that don't fit into any category, subjects that don't fit into any category, subjects that intrigued Segan. "My work is expressionistic. A good deal of it is derived from emotion," he says.
Though Segan will receive his degree in August, he has no definite plans for the future. "I want to devote as much time to printmaking as possible. I don't how how I'm going to support myself, but I would like to get a part-time teaching job," he says. He has applied for a National Foundation of the Arts fellowship for printmaking and a Fulbright-Hayes Travel Grant, to study printmaking in either Peru or Columbia. Next year, he plans to apply for a Tiffany Foundation grant, offered to printmakers in an alternate year.
At the moment, Segan's concern is the direction his work will take. He anticipates the changes he will make in his life also will effect his work. Segan says that even the past four or five months have marked a change in his work, with the introduction of mixed media to his style. But with or without a new direction in style, Segan's work has met with considerable praise and success. And, "I expect him to keep on doing so,' Stack says.