Kenneth Callahan Art

B. 1905-1986 The Spokane-born painter Kenneth Callahan was one of the leading artists of the Pacific Northwest school. As a young painter he was exhibited in the First Biennial Exhibition of Contemporary Art at the Whitney Museum in New York. He subsequently was recognized in a breakthrough 1953 Life magazine article as one of the "Mystic Painters of the Northwest."

He spent years working as a curator at the Seattle Art Museum, and when he was fired in 1952 (he had been using the museum as a studio, which a new curator found reprehensible), he continued painting and selling paintings from his studio on the south fork of the Stillaguamish River, near Granite Falls in Snohomish County.

Callahan was only 27 when in 1933 his work was included in the seminal First Biennial Exhibition of Contemporary Art at the Whitney Museum, in New York. In 1953, Life magazine dubbed him one of the four leading Pacific Northwest painters. He owed his emotional stability in no small part to the fact that he married well. At a time when other artists of his generation suffered through economic and relationship traumas, he enjoyed a stable and supportive home life and a job as curator at the Seattle Art Museum (SAM) that gave him a measure of community prestige in addition to income. During the 1950s, he wrote art criticism for The Seattle Times. His honors included a Guggenheim Fellowship and a major retrospective at the Henry Art Gallery