William Kent (artist)

Born in Kansas City, Missouri. He graduated from Northwestern University, Chicago, and, after service in the Navy came to Yale University to study Music Theory with world-famous composer Paul Hindemith. While at Yale he became interested in art, and began to teach himself to paint in oils, sculpt in clay, and carve in marble and wood. In the early 1960s he began carving huge discarded slate blackboards, and developed a unique method of printing monoprints on fabric without assistance or the use of machinery. His exhibitions in New York City in the 1960s were critically acclaimed, and his sculptures and slate prints were bought by museums and important collectors.

By the mid-1960s he moved to a farm house in Durham, Connecticut and continued working there on his monumental wood sculptures until two days before his death. In 1961, Kent became the first curator for the John Slade Ely House. In 2009, he received an award honoring artistic excellence from the Arts Council of Greater New Haven. In recent years he has exhibited locally with The Sculpture Mile at Madison, Greene Art Gallery, Guilford, the York Square Cinema in New Haven, and Kehler Liddell Gallery in Westville.

More photographs of William Kent's works, as well as several essays by art critics and historians, can be viewed at RediscoveredMasters.com.

A number of years before his death he formed the William Kent Charitable Foundation for the purpose of helping indigent artists, a state in which he found himself at times over the years.

• R.I.P. William Kent remembered, age 93 - CT.com article by Alan Bisbort: The Artist Remembered
• New York Times article - "How Prints Got an Artist in Hot Water".
• "Wood Be Master" 2002 Gadfly Online article.
• New York Times article: September 3, 2000:
• Rediscovered Masters.
• William Kent exhibition at the York Square Gallery, New Haven, CT. September 2000.