Kady JLKR

Kady JLKR (Janet Ruttenberg) grew up in Dubuque, Iowa, a child art prodigy with a successful artist uncle based in Paris as a guide. Created at age 11, her collage Dubuque 4th Street Elevator decorated her father's orthodontics office: it shows Dubuque's famous funicular with passengers visible through the car windows and overgrown landscape with various animals, all subjects at the heart of her mature prints, paintings and multimedia works.

In 1949, the eighteen-year-old Janet was accepted by Mauricio Lasansky at his acclaimed University of Iowa print workshop. Two etchings made under Lasansky look like premonitions of the artist she is today. One portrays a family through their car window and the other shows a film projected in an Iowa City movie theater. The first prefigures her Park Avenue works developed from the late 1960s through the 1970s and the second is an intimation of the paintings into which she would begin to project her own videos around 2008–2009.

When she moved to New York from Chicago in 1965, Kady JLKR was inspired by watching traffic on Park Avenue with buildings and trees reflected off the cars. Park Avenue was her first extended project to celebrate New York and New Yorkers by orchestrating print making with photography and painting at an unprecedented scale. These works have not been seen in public since 1977 when they were exhibited in the Union Carbide Building at 270 Park Avenue. The exhibition included a 70-foot long frieze of 14 horizontal stainless steel panels with mixed media representations of car traffic on Park Avenue as a modern procession in profile, as hieratic as memorial images of ancient Egyptian royalty. Each car panel is itself etched, and sometimes painted with automotive enamel, so that the etching plate is itself developed as the work of art rather than simply a matrix for printing secondary images. Hinged over car windows are shaped etchings on paper that represent drivers and passengers unaware that they are being observed. An extensive portrait of modern urban consumer culture, the Park Avenue frieze celebrates car culture in keeping with Pop and New Realism paintings and films with cars as icons.

In the mid 1980s, Kady JLKR found a studio just steps from Central Park. The idea of painting in the Park held no special interest until walking through it one day, she was struck by the diversity of human interaction juxtaposed with the natural beauty of its surroundings and became inspired. By around 2008 she was a park regular, working out-of-doors in Impressionist fashion every day to capture the landscape looking south across the Sheep Meadow to the skyline along West 59th Street, a subject that she has already rendered in more than fifty enormous watercolor studies that are the basis for acrylics and oils of the same scale developed in her studio. These works are landscape variations with New Yorkers posed like pagans relaxing in Old Master images of the Golden Age. Stressing the sweep and structure of the landscape, the artist also incorporates the comings and goings of hundreds of characters, families, friends, sunbathers, lovers—all unwitting models for her brush or her camera.