Kady JLKR

Kady JLKR (Janet Lee Kadesky Ruttenberg) is an innovative contemporary artist with technical mastery across various mediums, including printmaking, painting, collage, and digital media.

Born in 1931 Janet grew up in Dubuque, Iowa, a child art prodigy. Her formal art training included summer programs at the Art Institute of Chicago, and in 1949 Janet was accepted by Mauricio Lasansky at his acclaimed University of Iowa print workshop. She settled in Chicago in 1951 after her marriage to lawyer and entrepreneur Derald Ruttenberg. During these years she initiated what became a lifelong series of exceptional family portraits.

The Ruttenberg family relocated to New York City in 1965, and Janet secured a loft studio, where she dedicated herself to experimental printmaking. Her most ambitious project – large stainless steel panels depicting traffic along Park Avenue – continues to evolve after nearly half a century.

Shifting to a more intimate scale in the early 1980s, Janet devoted a series of richly colored intaglio prints to the theatrical grandeur of Kenneth’s, the high society hair salon on 64th Street. Around this time her husband acquired a hunting estate in Scotland, where during visits Janet worked in relative isolation on large paintings of every sort from landscapes to portraits.

In 1990, after acquiring her current studio on West 74th Street, Janet’s focus turned to the ever-changing scenes of nearby Central Park. There, she embraced plein air painting, producing monumental watercolors teeming with dozens of figures. During the winter months, she transitioned to oil paintings on a similarly grand scale, translating the compositions from her watercolors using an extensive archive of sketches and photographs. Over the past three decades, she has completed more than a hundred monumental watercolors and over a dozen corresponding oil paintings, many of which have evolved over decades.

With the advent of smartphone video technology, around 2009 Janet began integrating moving images into her work. By the time of her 2013 exhibition at the Museum of the City of New York, she was projecting video onto her monumental Central Park paintings, exploiting the interplay between static and dynamic imagery. She subsequently developed intricate video frames for these works composed of interconnected monitors, each roughly the size of an iPhone. In her recent works, she has embedded these monitors directly into her canvases, alongside broken mirrors and photographs, creating enormous multimedia collages that document her shifting perceptions while interrogating the very act of image-making—what she sees and how she chooses to render it.

In late 2023, Janet revisited the Park Avenue stainless steel panels that she had put aside in 1978, now elaborating them with video projections to capture the distorted reflections of buildings on the surfaces of passing cars. Simultaneously her already ambitious project has expanded into an immersive installation.