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2010s

2010s
  • Bronze Pour
  • Drawings and Prints
  • Hometown Artist's Rodeo
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  • Performance
  • Public Art
  • Shoe Sculpture

2000s

2000s
  • $1 Bill Sculpture
  • Hometown Artist's Rodeo
  • Images of the Artist
  • Installations
  • Kaneko Studio
  • MIxed Media/Fabric Sculpture
  • Neon Sculpture
  • Performance
  • Public Art
  • Drawings and Prints
  • Shoe Sculpture

1990s

1990s
  • Bronze Edition Sculpture
  • Bronze Shoe Sculpture
  • Cast Iron
  • Ceramics
  • Drawings and Prints
  • Images of the Artist
  • Installations
  • Mixed Media
  • Neon Sculpture

1980s

1980s
  • Bronze Sculpture
  • Cast Iron
  • Ceramics
  • Drawings
  • Images of The Artist
  • Installations
  • Kohler Arts Industry Residency (1988)
  • Paper Sculpture
  • Performance Art
  • Public Art
  • Shoe Sculpture

1970s

1970s
  • Ceramics
  • Drawings and Paintings
  • Mixed Media Sculptures
  • Images of the Artist
  • Performance

1960s

1960s
  • Ceramics
  • Drawings
  • Images of the Artist
  • Paintings

1950s

1950s
  • ArtWork
  • Images of the Artist
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© 2012 - 2023 Ken Little

Installations

Ken Little:   Statement / Philosophy,  2003  for the Catalog of  “Ken Little: Little Changes” a Survey Exhibition and a Body of New Work opening in 2003 at the Southwest School of Art in San Antonio, and traveling in 2004 to The Salt Lake Art Center (Utah), The Missoula Museum of the Arts (Montana), The Bemis Center, Omaha (Nebraska) and the Desmond Lee Gallery Of Washington University in St Louis (Missouri) and in 2005 to the Landmark Arts Gallery at Texas Tech University (Lubbock)

As early as I can remember, I knew that I wanted to be an artist.  That has remained consistent in my life from hand painting china with my grandmother when I was six years old to now at fifty six as I fabricate lifesize suits and larger than life body parts from $1 bills.  My idea of what an artist is and what they do has evolved a lot.  When I was a kid I wanted to animate for Walt Disney.  As a young man, I wanted to emulate the western artists like Charlie Russell.  In college, I learned of Abstract Expressionism, Pop Art, Conceptual, Process, and Minimal art.  Now I guess it’s Postmodernism?  I think that I have taken something from all these experiences as well as life and the more popular culture.

I’ve lived on the high flat plains of West Texas and the Lower East Side of Manhattan.  I’ve lived in the mountains of Missoula Montana and in the San Francisco Bay area.  Most recently, I have been living in the hill country of south Texas and spending time on the Kona coast of the big island of Hawaii.

Artists like Hank Williams, Bob Wills, Thelonius Monk, Buddy Holly, and David Byrne have been as influential on me as Marcel Duchamp, Joseph Beuys, Bruce Nauman, Eva Hesse, and H.C. Westermann, Rudy Autio, William Wiley, Robert Arneson, and Jim Nutt are some of my close influences.  John Buck, Donald Lipski, Terry Allen, Luis Jimenez, Nancy Rubins, Hiroki Morinoue, Pat Schuchard, Deborah Butterfield, and Robert Brady are some of my contemporaries.

My work reflects a need to invent and evolve.  I like to move through things and onto others and then come back through again in a new way.  I was a ceramic sculptor for about ten years.  In about 1980, I made the transition to using a number of media making sculpture, installations, and performances.  My work has almost always been figurative in one way or another.  Readings have run the gamut from the literal autobiographical to more universal ruminations on themes from the world of ideas.

I work with my hands and my head.  Really, I guess, in a sort of antique way.  I usually don’t know where I am going or exactly what I am going to make until I establish some sort of dialog between my process or materials and my ideas or subject matter.  I can’t really say that one comes before the other.  In fact, when things are working best, I am really transported somewhere else doing something that I could never have imagined or planned.

I’ve been lucky.  I’ve shown my work at some great places.  I’ve met some amazing people, some of who are my good friends.  I’ve had some terrific students, thirty years of them. Many of them have gone on to be important artists and almost all of them are friends, too.

During my career as an artist, I have made lots of different things out of different materials with different processes.  I have made ceramic furniture, tools and life-sized figures.  I have worked through ceramics and mixed media to installations, performance, and objects made from all kinds of stuff.  There have been bears made of shoes and boots, deer made of roadmaps, automobiles from dictionary pages, houses from Bible pages and charcoal briquettes.  There have been suits and dresses sewn from $1 bills, masks in bronze, hands in neon, ladders made into buildings, and cast iron feet.

This new body of work builds on my past explorations with suited figures and oversized body parts (heads, hands, and feet) which are made of $1 bills over lightweight steel and hardware cloth armatures.  This exhibition will open in the summer of 2003 at the Southwest School for Art and Craft in San Antonio and tour nationally for 2-3 years.

"Ken Little: Little Changes" a survey Exhibition and a new Body of Work installed at tha Southwest School of Art, San Antonio, Texas, July 24- September 7, 2003
"Ken Little: Little Changes" a survey Exhibition and a new Body of Work installed at tha Southwest School of Art, San Antonio, Texas, July 24- September 7, 2003
"Ken Little: Little Changes" a survey Exhibition and a new Body of Work installed at tha Southwest School of Art, San Antonio, Texas, July 24- September 7, 2003
"Ken Little: Little Changes" a survey Exhibition and a new Body of Work installed at tha Southwest School of Art, San Antonio, Texas, July 24- September 7, 2003
"Ken Little: Little Changes" a survey Exhibition and a new Body of Work installed at tha Southwest School of Art, San Antonio, Texas, July 24- September 7, 2003
"Ken Little: Little Changes" a survey Exhibition and a new Body of Work installed at tha Southwest School of Art, San Antonio, Texas, July 24- September 7, 2003
"Ken Little: Little Changes" a survey Exhibition and a new Body of Work installed at tha Southwest School of Art, San Antonio, Texas, July 24- September 7, 2003
"Ken Little: Little Changes" a survey Exhibition and a new Body of Work installed at tha Southwest School of Art, San Antonio, Texas, July 24- September 7, 2003
"Ken Little: Little Changes" a survey Exhibition and a new Body of Work installed at tha Southwest School of Art, San Antonio, Texas, July 24- September 7, 2003
"Ken Little: Little Changes" a survey Exhibition and a new Body of Work installed at tha Southwest School of Art, San Antonio, Texas, July 24- September 7, 2003
"Ken Little: Little Changes" a survey Exhibition and a new Body of Work installed at tha Southwest School of Art, San Antonio, Texas, July 24- September 7, 2003
"Ken Little: Little Changes" a survey Exhibition and a new Body of Work installed at tha Southwest School of Art, San Antonio, Texas, July 24- September 7, 2003
"Ken Little: Little Changes" a survey Exhibition and a new Body of Work installed at tha Southwest School of Art, San Antonio, Texas, July 24- September 7, 2003
"Ken Little: Little Changes" a survey Exhibition and a new Body of Work installed at tha Southwest School of Art, San Antonio, Texas, July 24- September 7, 2003
"Ken Little: Little Changes" a survey Exhibition and a new Body of Work installed at tha Southwest School of Art, San Antonio, Texas, July 24- September 7, 2003
"Ken Little: Little Changes" a survey Exhibition and a new Body of Work installed at tha Southwest School of Art, San Antonio, Texas, July 24- September 7, 2003
"Ken Little: Little Changes" a survey Exhibition and a new Body of Work installed at tha Southwest School of Art, San Antonio, Texas, July 24- September 7, 2003
"RIsk" 2005; a collaboration with Richie Budd; Mixed medias, $1 bills, hot glue, Video surveillance equipment, a smoke machine, etc. “Risk” Exhibition, July1-31, 2005, Blue Star Art Space “Risk” is a collaboration between artists Richie Budd and Ken Little. It was initially generated by an invitation for Little to exhibit in a group exhibition around the theme of “risk in or contemporary society”. Little invited Budd to transform a pair of his dollar bill figures using his trademark hot glue to incorporate video surveillance systems, fog machines, rope lights, motion sensors, a fart machine, and a scent machine, along with items of kitsch both had collected from thrift stores. They collaborated on a sound track for the piece that uses readings from warning labels on common household products, prescription drugs, and other consumer goods. “Risk” is a very American work with references in the high and popular culture, to the worship and pursuit of power in the cult of entertainment and personality. The world of soul, spirit, and intellect is suppressed. The secular pleasures, the warnings, and the fears of the material world are dominant.
"RIsk" 2005; a collaboration with Richie Budd; Mixed medias
"RIsk"(Her) 2005; a collaboration with Richie Budd; Mixed medias
"RIsk" (Him) 2005; a collaboration with Richie Budd; Mixed medias
"RIsk" (detail of Her) 2005; a collaboration with Richie Budd; Mixed medias
"RIsk" (detail of Her) 2005; a collaboration with Richie Budd; Mixed medias
"Heavy Metal, Glow, Bucks, and Dough" a One Person Exhibition of new work by Ken Little at the Finesilver Gallery, Houston, Texas, 2008
"Heavy Metal, Glow, Bucks, and Dough" Finesilver Gallery, Houston, Texas, 2008
"Heavy Metal, Glow, Bucks, and Dough" Finesilver Gallery, Houston, Texas, 2008
"Heavy Metal, Glow, Bucks, and Dough" Finesilver Gallery, Houston, Texas, 2008
"Heavy Metal, Glow, Bucks, and Dough" Finesilver Gallery, Houston, Texas, 2008
"Heavy Metal, Glow, Bucks, and Dough" Finesilver Gallery, Houston, Texas, 2008
"Heavy Metal, Glow, Bucks, and Dough" Finesilver Gallery, Houston, Texas, 2008
"Heavy Metal, Glow, Bucks, and Dough" Finesilver Gallery, Houston, Texas, 2008
"Heavy Metal, Glow, Bucks, and Dough" Finesilver Gallery, Houston, Texas, 2008
"Heavy Metal, Glow, Bucks, and Dough" Finesilver Gallery, Houston, Texas, 2008
"Heavy Metal, Glow, Bucks, and Dough" Finesilver Gallery, Houston, Texas, 2008
"Heavy Metal, Glow, Bucks, and Dough" Finesilver Gallery, Houston, Texas, 2008
Ken Little, a One Person Exhibition at the Redbud Gallery, Houston, Texas, 2006
Ken Little, a One Person Exhibition at the Redbud Gallery, Houston, Texas, 2006
Ken Little, a One Person Exhibition at the Redbud Gallery, Houston, Texas, 2006
Ken Little, a One Person Exhibition at the Redbud Gallery, Houston, Texas, 2006
Ken Little, a One Person Exhibition at the Redbud Gallery, Houston, Texas, 2006
Ken Little, a One Person Exhibition at the Redbud Gallery, Houston, Texas, 2006