LAGUNA COLLEGE OF ART + DESIGN’S MFA PROGRAMS IN DRAWING + PAINTING PRESENT A DISTINGUISHED ARTIST LECTURE

DAVID KASSAN

SEPTEMBER 16, 2019
5:00PM

LAGUNA COLLEGE OF ART + DESIGN
MAIN CAMPUS, STUDIO 8 (MC8)
2222 LAGUNA CANYON ROAD
LAGUNA BEACH, CA 92651

FREE ADMISSION

OPEN TO LCAD STUDENTS, FACULTY, STAFF AND ALUMNI

DAVID JON KASSAN (born February 25, 1977[1] in Little Rock, Arkansas) is an internationally recognized contemporary American painter best known for his life-size representational paintings, which combine figurative subjects with abstract backgrounds or “tromp l’oeil texture studies,”[2] Of this dual representation strategy Kassan notes, “my effort to constantly learn to document reality with a naturalistic, representational painting technique allows for pieces to be inherent contradictions; paintings that are both real and abstract.”[3] Kassan’s work is best classified as Social Documentary Painting, due to the importance and relevance of the subjects he chooses to represent.

In 2014, Kassan turned his attention to painting and documenting Survivors of the Holocaust, with the development of the EDUT project )-“edut” being Hebrew for “living witnesses” as a way of connecting with his grandfather’s traumatic history of escaping ethnic cleansing on the border of Romania and Ukraine to come to America in 1917. The EDUT project’s mission is to meet with as many living Survivors to the Shoah as possible and to document them in filmed video portraits and in paintings and drawings.

While many survivors have already told their stories on video (as in the Visual History Archive developed by the USC Shoah Foundation) or in memoirs, Kassan believes painting offers viewers a different kind of connection to the survivors, one that puts a personal face to the sometimes abstract idea of the Holocaust.

In 2017, David Kassan partnered with the USC Shoah Foundation and the USC Fisher Museum of Art to develop the EDUT project into a Resilience Exhibition which will open at the Fisher Museum in the fall of 2019 in Los Angeles.

Kassan is a much sought after drawing and painting instructor because of his steadfast commitment to the age old discipline of working from life and creating compelling expressions of the human condition. He has given painting/drawing seminars and lectures at various institutions, and universities around the world. In 2013, he founded the Kassan Foundation in hopes of giving grants directly to underprivileged talent in both the visual and musical arts.

Kassan works can be seen in many public and private collections worldwide. He is represented by Gallery Henoch (Chelsea), New York, NY and The Maxwell Alexander Gallery in Los Angeles, CA.

Kassan currently lives in Albuquerque. NM.