Renovated Reputations: Recent Work by Kenney Mencher

The Art Museum of Los Gatos presents Renovated Reputations, an immersive exhibition experience featuring works conceived as a collaboration in painting, creative fiction, and design. At once noir, bohemian and pulp in style, the works invite the viewer to step inside and sit awhile, discover their stories and spark engagement.

A portrait is a painting in which something is wrong with the mouth.

John Singer Sargent

My latest series of paintings are an attempt to take a series of nameless vintage portraits and give each a new identity.  By colorizing these portraits and adding an environment of ephemera I was able to give each a little bit of a back-story, I’m also a collaborator. I wanted the entire body of work to be placed in a greater context so I engaged writers with short “flash fiction” to fill in some of the blanks as to who each person was. I designed books, newspapers, and I’m installing an environment of mid-century furniture to create reading rooms, kitchens, and couches in which my fellow collaborators can sit and read books and papers that feature the people who are staring out at them from the walls of the gallery. Photo booths, fiction, and funny people! 

    –Kenney Mencher

Kenney Mencher is a painter and a professor of Art History and Studio Art at Ohlone College in Fremont, CA. He is also the Gallery Director and Curator at the Louis –Meager Art Gallery.