Artist Conversation: Tobi Kahn

Paid parking is available in Lot 2A (4849 Calhoun Road, 77004) or in the Welcome Center Garage.

Monday, February 27, 2023

7:00-8:00pm (reception begins at 6:30pm)

Hear artist Tobi Kahn in conversation with his daughter, award-winning writer and journalist Mattie Kahn, about the spiritual dimensions of his painting practice. Tobi Kahn’s OHRA (2000-03), a recent gift by members of the Blaffer family to Public Art UHS, is on view in the Health and Biomedical Sciences Center Building at UH. Comprised of seven panels, OHRA was created for a non-denominational chapel in the master-planned village of New Harmony, Indiana. Although the chapel was never completed, Kahn’s hope is that this work brings inspiration to the campus community: “Art can be in a place where students, doctors, people who need health care, can be uplifted.”

Please join us at 6:30pm for a reception and light refreshments before the conversation begins at 7:00pm.

MEETING Location

University of Houston

Room Health & Biomedical Sciences Building

1st Floor, Auditorium 186 (near the lobby facing Martin Luther King Boulevard)

4849 Calhoun Road, 77004

Parking

Paid parking is available in Lot 2A (4849 Calhoun Road, 77004) or in the Welcome Center Garage.

Mezzanine_442

Tobi Kahn is a painter and sculptor whose art has been shown in over 70 solo museum exhibitions. Works by Kahn are in major museum collections, including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, NYC; the Houston Museum of Fine Arts, TX; The Phillips Collection, DC; Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY; Minneapolis Institute of Art, MN; Yale University Art Gallery, CT; Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, PA; and The Jewish Museum, NYC. His traveling museum exhibitions include Tobi Kahn: Metamorphoses; Avoda: Objects of the Spirit; Microcosmos; Tobi Kahn: Sky & Water; and Tobi Kahn: Sacred Spaces for the 21st Century.

Kahn has been commissioned to create numerous installations including SHALEV, an outdoor sculpture, New Harmony, IN; EMET, a meditative space for the HealthCare Chaplaincy, NYC; two sculptural Holocaust memorial gardens, La Jolla, CA, and Tenafly, NJ; M’AHL, a floor installation in the exhibition Rendering the Unthinkable, 9/11 Memorial Museum, NYC as well as two bronze memorial sculptures for the Grey Art Gallery of NYU and the 9/11 Memorial Museum, NYC; a meditative space for Auburn Theological Seminary, NYC; and an outdoor sculpture installation and painting for the East Falls campus of Thomas Jefferson University, Philadelphia, PA.

In 2022, The Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C. installed a unit of 7 paintings that are part of the museum’s permanent collection with works from 1977-2020. The exhibition was on view from February-July 2022 and received media coverage in Forbes, The Brooklyn Rail and Hyperallergic to name a few.

Kahn’s work is the subject of two solo traveling museum exhibitions; FORMATION: Images of the Body that opened at the Dadian Gallery at the Henry Luce III Center for Arts and Religion in Washington, D.C. and then traveled to the Brother Kenneth Chapmann Gallery at Iona University. ELEMENTAL: A Decade of Paintings by Tobi Kahn will open November 2022 at the Patchogue Arts Council – MoCA L.I. – Museum of Contemporary Art Long Island.

Kahn also communicates his vision through his passion for teaching. For over 30 years, he has taught fine arts at the School of Visual Arts, NYC and lectures extensively at universities and public forums internationally on the importance of visual language and on art as healing.

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Mattie Kahn is an award-winning writer and editor. Her work has been published in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, Harper’s Bazaar, Vogue, Vox, and more. She was the culture director at Glamour, where she covered women’s issues and politics, and a staff editor at Elle. Her first book, Young and Restless: The Girls Who Sparked America’s Revolutions will be out in June 2023 from Viking. She lives in New York with her husband. 









Sunday, February 26, 2023 2:00-3:00pm. Enjoy a mindful moment in a guided meditation workshop led by Ann Friedman of the Mind Body Spirit Institute at The Jung Center of Houston. 

Tobi Kahn | OHRA: An Encounter Between Sky and Water

Blaffer Family Gifts Public Art UHS Artwork by Renowned New York Artist Tobi Kahn.

Tobi Kahn, OHRA (2000-03)

Acrylic on canvas stretched over wood; seven panel suite, each 88 x 60 1/2 inches. Gift of Anne Dale Owen and Jane Blaffer Owen, 2021