Morton Kaish is an American artist whose paintings, drawings, and prints can be found in major museums, including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and the British Museum.
Kaish’s light and color-filled works have been exhibited nationally and internationally including: the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, The Butler Institute of American Art, the Ann Norton Sculpture Gardens, the American Embassy in Rome, Haifa University, The American Cultural Center in Jerusalem, Hollis Taggart Galleries in Washington, D.C. and New York City; Irving Gallery, Palm Beach; the Staempfli Gallery in New York City.
Critics have noted Kaish’s powerful ability to combine traditional and experimental painting techniques with contemporary insights. Reviews of his work can be found in The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Christian Science Monitor and TIME, among other publications.
Kaish is Professor Emeritus in the School of Art and Design at the Fashion Institute
of Technology / State University of New York. He has served as Artist-in-Residence at Dartmouth College; The University of Washington in Seattle; Haifa University in Israel, as well as on the faculties of The New School, the National Academy of Design, and The Art Students League of New York.
He has been Visiting Artist at Boston University; Columbia University; Queens College; The Parsons School of Design; Philadelphia College of Art; The School of Visual Arts; Susquehanna University; and the Tyler School of Art, Rome.
Kaish was born in Newark, New Jersey and grew up in Maplewood. He earned his Bachelor of Fine Arts from Syracuse University where he was awarded the Hiram Gee Fellowship in Painting. He continued his studies at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière in Paris, the Istituto d’Arte in Florence, and the Accademia di Belle Arti in Rome.
Kaish has been honored with The Benjamin West Clinedinst Memorial Medal for exceptional artistic merit by the Artists’ Fellowship, awarded the Alumni Award for Achievement in the Arts by Syracuse University, and was elected to the National Academy of Design in 1988. He received the National Academy’s Lifetime Achievement Award in 2011.
