Walter Askin

Walter Miller Askin was an American artist and educator, best known for his printmaking, who also paints and sculpts.

Askin's work has been described as lighthearted and humorous, with an undercurrent of a serious tone, including content on the "dichotomous relationship between the sexes and the criticism of art itself." He has been inspired by both Western and non-Western art.

In 1954, Askin received his first solo exhibition at the de Young Museum in San Francisco. Work by Askin was included in the 1956 group exhibition Recent Drawings U.S.A. at MoMA, the Kunstlerhaus Vienna, the Whitney Museum of Art and other venues.

In 2015, the Luckman Gallery presented a solo exhibition of Askin's art, describing his work as "rang[ing] from sardonic graphic works, large painterly abstractions, to vibrant figurative sculptures." In 2016, his work was part of the two-person show, Reality Reorganized: Walter Askin and Wayne Kimball's Mysterious Discursions at the Brigham Young University Museum of Art.

Askin returned to UC Berkeley to teach in 1969 and 1970, and was Professor of Art at California State University, Los Angeles from 1956 to 1992, where he taught studio art and art history.

A recorded interview and transcript of the interview is available at the Smithsonian American Archives of Art. An archive of his papers from 1950 to 1992 is held in the Archives of American Art.

Text courtesy of Wikipedia, 2023