Ted Kuykendall

1953-2009

American (United States, New Mexico, Roswell)

Born in Roswell, New Mexico, in 1953, Ted Kuykendall was a self-trained artist who developed his own vision and skills through hands-on experience. He apprenticed with the fiberglass sculptor Luis Jimenez, and picked up some basics of photography through a friend, Richard Schaeffer. 
Making his first photographs in 1975, Kuykendall began creating his own sculptural sets six years later, when he was attending photography classes at the University of New Mexico. By combining sculptural concerns with the "laws of the two-dimensional image," he develops his ideas through a process not totally divorced from the real world. Objects are given new context that marries two- and three-dimensional concerns.
Since 1981 Kuykendall's work has been collected and exhibited in cities from San Francisco to Washington, D.C., and at the Museum of Fine Arts in Santa Fe. In 1991 he received the Willard Van Dyke Award for Photography.