Timeline

About Luise
Timeline

Sculptor, painter, collagist, and educator, Luise Kaish was a key figure in the New York art scene of the late 20th century. The strength and breadth of her work, her influential role in education, and the prestigious awards she received in recognition of her practice set her apart as an early female leader in the arts.

1925
Born in Atlanta, Georgia, on September 8, the middle child of Harry and Elsa Meyers, older sister Ruth (b. 1923), younger brother David (b. 1930).

1930–1941
The Meyers family moves to Flushing, Queens. Luise attends grade school at P.S. 32, studies at the Manhattan School of Music, and enrolls in Sunday school at the Flushing Free Synagogue, where broad-minded Rabbi Max Meyer takes his students to visit churches of other denominations. His accepting approach lays the groundwork for her interfaith appreciation and her interest in ecclesiastical art and architecture. At age sixteen she graduates from Bayside High School, where she is art editor of the yearbook and captain of the cheerleaders.

1941–1946
Enrolls in the art education program with a minor in voice at Syracuse University and earns her BFA in 1946. In the winter of 1944, meets painter Morton Kaish, who is a student in the fine arts program, and they become engaged three years later.

1946–1947
Wins a Syracuse University postgraduate fellowship and studies abroad in Mexico. Attends Escuela Nacional de Pintura y Escultura, studying painting with Jesús Guerrero Galván and Alfredo Zalce, and art history with Diego Rivera. Explores lithography at the Taller de Gráfica Popular and intaglio at the Escuela de las Artes del Libro, and creates her first sculptures. Travels throughout Mexico and Guatemala.

1947
Accepted into the MFA program at Syracuse University, where she studies with renowned Croatian sculptor Ivan Meštrović and is appointed instructor of etching and lithography. Awarded the Everson Museum First Prize in Graphics.

1948
Luise and Morton marry in August at Essex House in New York City.

1951
Receives MFA from Syracuse. Creates first major commission: a statue of the emblematic Saltine Warrior for the University campus. Her sculpture Mother and Child is selected for inclusion in American Sculpture 1951 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Other artists selected for this juried exhibition include Alexander Calder, José de Creeft, Chaim Gross, Robert Laurent, Paul Manship, and William Zorach. 

Moves to Rochester, New York. Attends services at Temple B’rith Kodesh, where she meets Rabbi Philip Bernstein, who plays a major role in her artistic and spiritual development. Receives the 1951 Jurors Show Award, jointly with Morton, from the Rochester Memorial Art Gallery. Also wins the H. Sullivan Award from the Rochester Memorial Art Gallery, as well as a Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Grant. The grant supports the couple’s first trip to Europe, including several months in Florence and travel by car through northern Italy, Belgium, Switzerland, southern France, and Spain.

1953
Exhibits in Women Welders at the Sculpture Center, alongside Barbara Lekberg, Lin Emery, Ruth Vodicka, Ilse Erythropel, Priscilla Pattison, Katherine Nash, and Dorothy Robbins.

1955
Exhibits in a two-person show with sculptor William Muir at the Sculpture Center. Among the works on view are Desert Specter and And Behold A Ladder Set Up on the Earth, which reflect the influence of the Western desert landscape, as well as a series of small sculptures of children at play. 

1956–1957
Second trip to Europe with Morton. The couple rents an apartment near the Trevi Fountain in Rome. Attends services at the Great Synagogue of Rome, which inspires a series of religious figures and prophets. Rabbi Philip Bernstein admires these works during a visit to her Rome studio and suggests a collaboration with architect Pietro Belluschi on the new Temple B’rith Kodesh in Rochester, New York. Travels to Egypt, Greece, Dachau, and Normandy.

1958
Returns to New York and moves into a skylit loft studio on MacDougal Street in Greenwich Village. The studio is located above the Rienzi coffee shop, where Allen Ginsberg reads poetry, and a few blocks away from the Cedar Tavern, Hans Hofmann’s art school, and Larry Rivers’s studio. Exhibits in first solo show at the Sculpture Center and receives critical acclaim from Robert Dash and Irving Sandler.

1959
Receives a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship. Exhibits in Contemporary American Painting and Sculpture at the Krannert Art Museum, University of Illinois at Champaign and alongside Ruth Asawa, John Chamberlain, Dorothy Dehner, Jacques Lipchitz, George Rickey, and David Smith in MoMA’s multivenue exhibition Recent Sculpture U.S.A., which is curated by James Thrall Soby. The exhibition travels to the Denver Art Museum, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, City Art Museum of Saint Louis, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

1960–1961
Awarded the sculptural commission for Temple B’rith Kodesh and selects the theme of the Ark of Revelation. Daughter Melissa is born on May 4, 1961.

1964
The Ark of Revelation is installed and dedicated in March. The Rochester Times-Union describes it as “one of the great examples of ecclesiastical art in America.” Travels to Portugal in the summer. Studies Manueline architecture, visits the local bronze-casting facilities, and creates landscape sketches.

1962–1966
Participates in a series of prestigious group exhibitions, including the Whitney Museum of American Art Annual Exhibition 1962, alongside Louise Nevelson, Isamu Noguchi, and Marisol; the Whitney Museum of American Art 1964 Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Sculpture, alongside Bruce Conner, Joseph Cornell, Claire Falkenstein, David Hare, and Edward Kienholz; and the historical exhibition Women Artists of America, 1707–1964, at the Newark Museum.  

1966
Commissioned by architect Richard Chalfant to design the altar for Temple Beth Shalom in Wilmington, Delaware. 

1965–1967
Creates the sculpture Christ in Glory and a tabernacle for the altar of the Holy Trinity Mission Seminary Church in Silver Spring, Maryland, which is commissioned by architect James T. Canazaro.

1967
Participates in the Protest and Hope exhibition at the New School Art Center along with Elaine de Kooning, Red Grooms, and George Segal. The exhibition garners positive reviews from critics Emily Genauer and Harold Rosenberg.

1968
Completes a non-figurative commission for Temple Beth Shalom. Luise Kaish: Recent Sculpture, curated by Phillip Bruno, opens at Staempfli Gallery, New York. During the summer, spends two months drawing and painting in East Hampton, where she meets Lee Krasner, Conrad Marca-Relli, and art critic Clement Greenberg.

1970
Awarded the Prix de Rome for Sculpture at the American Academy in Rome as well as the Augustus Saint-Gaudens Fellowship. The most influential studio visits are from Philip Guston, Harold Clurman, and Buckminster Fuller. Begins work on the Voyages and Spheres sculpture series. Also meets artists Charles Perry, Jack Zajac, Varujan Boghosian, Dimitri Hadzi, and Susan Smyly.

1972
Exhibits the Voyages and Spheres series in Luise Kaish: Recent Sculpture at the American Academy in Rome and K x 2: Luise Kaish Sculture, Morton Kaish Pitture / K x 2: Paintings by Morton Kaish, Sculpture by Luise Kaish at the American Embassy in Rome. Begins work on a commission for the Wall of Martyrs, a large-scale, eight-panel bronze sculpture commemorating Jewish martyrdom throughout history for the Beth El Synagogue Center in New Rochelle. Travels to Turkey, Istanbul, Israel, Tunisia and Sicily. Exhibits in American Women: Twentieth Century at the Lakeview Center for the Arts and Sciences, Peoria, Illinois, alongside Ruth Asawa, Lynda Benglis, Lee Bontecou, Louise Bourgeois, Judy Chicago, Helen Frankenthaler, Grace Hartigan, and Marisol. 

1973
Luise Kaish Sculpture, a retrospective exhibition of more than eighty works, opens at the Jewish Museum. Invited to be a panelist at the American Jewish Congress in Jerusalem. She is the only speaker representing the visual arts alongside other cultural luminaries including American-Israeli poet Shirley Kaufman, conductor and composer Hugo Weisgall, rabbi and author Chaim Potok, and novelist Herbert Gold.

1973–74
Completes commissions Eternal Light for Hebrew Union College, Jerusalem; Menorah and Eternal Light for Temple B’nai Abraham, Essex County, New Jersey; and Four Editions: Twelve Tribes, Moses, Menorah, Shabbat, for the Jewish Museum, New York. 

1974–1975
Commissioned by art patron and philanthropist Vera List to create a memorial to the Holocaust for the Jewish Museum, which will be installed in its Fifth Avenue entrance from 1975 to 1993. 

1975
Awarded a joint summer residency with Morton at the MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, New Hampshire. Meets printmakers Clare Romano and John Ross and poets Rachal Hadas and Peter Viereck. Begins experimenting with collage using charred canvas, creating the first works in her Burntworks series.

Appointed to the board of trustees of the American Academy in Rome. Serves in the position until 1981 and is one of only a few women on the board. Other members of the academy’s board of trustees (or the fine arts advisory panel for sculpture) during this time include Edward Larrabee Barnes, Walker Cain, Adele Chatfield-Taylor, Philip Guston, Susan Morse Hilles, Jasper Johns, J. Russell Lynes Jr., Philip Johnson, Claes Oldenburg, George Segal, James Johnson Sweeney, and Jack Tworkov.

1975–1976
Creates La Lumière, a monumental mobile orb made of highly reflective silicon bronze, commissioned by Michel and Mary Ann Fribourg for Continental Grain Company’s New York corporate offices.

1979
Travels to Alaska. The dramatic landscapes inspire the mixed media collages of the 1980’s and her exploration of colors and textures.

1980–1986
Appointed professor and chair of the Division of Painting and Sculpture at Columbia University. Establishes a gallery to exhibit student work, modernizes the studios, and invites distinguished visiting artists Lee Krasner, Alice Neel, Charles and Ray Eames, Sean Scully, and Laurie Anderson. A popular professor, Luise facilitates dialogue between sculptors and painters, encouraging students to work in both mediums. 

1981
Luise Kaish: Recent Collages opens at Staempfli Gallery, New York. The exhibition features the new Burntworks series, some of which incorporate vivid colors. The Metropolitan Museum of Art acquires one of the works, H.H.H, for its permanent collection.

1983-1984
First trip to the Far East: Japan, Hong Kong and Thailand further influence her mixed media works.

1987–89
Travels to Paris to formulate an undergraduate exchange program for painting and sculpture students between Columbia University and the École des Beaux-Arts. Visits London in May 1987 and December 1988, where she studies the Turner collection at Tate Britain. 

1989
Honored with the George Arents Pioneer Medal, Syracuse University’s highest alumni honor. Becomes one of the first women to be elected to the Century Association in New York.

1990
The solo exhibition Luise Kaish opens at the University of Arkansas Fine Arts Center Gallery in Fayetteville, Arkansas.

1993
Named professor emerita in the Faculty of Art at Columbia University, and trustee emerita at the American Academy in Rome. 

1993–1998
Focuses primarily on landscape painting. She is drawn to a remote area of Central Park with a grove of cherry blossom trees, which she visits repeatedly and nicknames her “allée.” Other locations that became inspirations for their natural beauty include Riverside Park and the Hudson River as seen from her studio in New York, as well as Sailfish Point in Palm Beach, Florida, and Sullivan’s Island, North Carolina, where she and Morton spent time during the winter months.

1998
The solo exhibition The Colors of Seasons, featuring her the landscape series, opens at the Century Association. In a brief opening statement to the exhibition, Luise emphasizes the emotive properties of color: “The poetics of color sound remembrance, shape memory, feeling, sequence events, the absurd. Color reveals a pathway to our hidden worlds beyond reserve.” That same year, her work is also included in Contemporary Artists Welcome the New Year—The Jewish Museum Graphic Commission.

2009–2010
Exhibits in From Maquette to Monument at the Century Association, which chronicles her creation of the Ark of Revelation through sixteen photographs she took at her studio, the bronze foundry, and Temple B’rith Kodesh in Rochester. In 2010, fifteen of the photographs are shown in a solo exhibition at B’rith Kodesh and subsequently become a permanent installation. The exhibition coincides with the Philip Bernstein commemorative Shabbat service, at which Luise delivers a lecture on the genesis and development of the Ark.

2009–2012
Creates a series of four axonometric drawings, which are conceived as conceptual studies for monumental relief sculptures. Constructed of gold paper, gold paint, and ink, these gem-like pieces are defined by bold, geometric lines, foregrounding her masterful drawing skills. The lines are scored in places so that the paper lifts, giving the works a collage-like three-dimensionality. 

2012
Exhibits with Morton for the last time in the Century Masters, Luise and Morton Kaish, K x 2: II at the Century Association.

2013
Dies March 7, 2013, at age eighty-seven. Luise requested her ashes be launched into deep space.