Artist Don Kimes Dedication to Barbara Rose

Dedication to Barbara Rose:

There were many art worlds swirling around Barbara. She was the connector, the believer, the touchstone, the vortex.  

This is written for all of us, to a dear friend who changed the art world and made us better for it. Her fierce intellect; her uncompromising, naked honesty; her pioneering charge into the unknown and untried; her mistakes and her successes; her warts and her beauty; the adventures we had; the battles she, and we, have fought and lost, and once in a while won together; the late night laughter; her belief in all of us whose lives she changed; these are all reasons why I, why we, will miss our friend, our partner in crime, our co-conspirator. 

Our relationship was about friendship more than career. If something good came of it, that was great. And if it didn't, that was okay too. We still had the friendship. Barbara always called me Clyde, and I always called her Bonnie. She signed all of her correspondence to me with one word: “Avanti!”. She was brilliant, had no tolerance for mediocrity, spoke five languages, and had an acerbic sense of humor. If she were alive today she would tell us not to look back at 2020. Instead look forward, because if you're looking back, you're probably going to run into a tree.

Barbara was the nexus who changed our lives. There will never be another like her. Avanti Barbara. Grazie, e Avanti! 

 

Exhibition History:

As an artist, Don Kimes' work has been included in more than 50 solo and 100 group exhibitions internationally, including Denise Bibro, Frederieke Taylor, Claudia Carr, Kouros, Stephan Gang, Lucky Strike, NY Studio School, Prince Street, and Arsenal galleries, National Academy of Design, Ammo Artists Space, Brooklyn Museum of Art (all New York City), The Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington Project for the Arts, National Academy of Sciences, Katzen Museum, Fondo del Sol Galleries, Hillyer Art Space, Sense Gallery  Elizabeth Robert's Gallery, Constitution Hall (all Washington, DC), Baltimore Museum of Art, Burchfield Penney Museum (Buffalo), Rueda Museum (Madrid), Biennale Internazionale di Firenze (Florence, Italy), Rocca Paolina (Perugia), ExMoenia (Todi, Italy), Living Art (Milan), America Haus (Munich), Casa di Cultura (Villahermosa, Mexico), and many others. Kimes has been a visiting artist at schools and universities throughout the United States, including Dartmouth, Bard, Carnegie-Mellon, UC Davis, Parsons, Syracuse, Cleveland Institute of Art, Harvard, Cooper Union, University of Pennsylvania and many others, as well as academies and universities in Rome, Umbria, Florence, Mexico, Germany and Latvia.