Kenneth Victor Young's 1970–72 Orb Paintings Reexamined at Andrew Kreps Gallery

Key facts

• Kenneth Victor Young: Works 1970–1972 is on view at Andrew Kreps Gallery, 394 Broadway, New York, from September 18 through October 31, 2026.
• The exhibition is organized in collaboration with Edward Tyler Nahem Fine Art.
• Young studied physics and chemical engineering at the University of Louisville before becoming a full-time artist.
• He worked on unstretched, unprimed canvas, allowing diluted acrylic pigment to soak into the fibers in the stain-painting technique of the Washington Color School.
• After moving to Washington, D.C., in 1964, he became acquainted with Gene Davis, Morris Louis, and Kenneth Noland and participated in the city's abstraction scene alongside Sam Gilliam and Alma Thomas.
• Andrew Kreps notes that Young and Gilliam were overlooked in early histories of the Washington Color School partly because of racial politics surrounding the Civil Rights era and their later arrival in Washington.
• Young worked for more than three decades as an exhibition designer at the Smithsonian Institution and also designed exhibitions internationally for the United States Information Agency.
• He taught art at the Corcoran School of Art from 1973 to 1985 and later taught exhibition design at the Duke Ellington School of the Arts.
• His work is held in the collections of the National Gallery of Art, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Pérez Art Museum Miami, Delaware Art Museum, and Birmingham Museum of Art.
• He received a solo exhibition at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., in 1974.