Clarence Kennedy

Background

Clarence Kennedy was born on September 4, 1892, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States.

Education

Clarence Kennedy earned a Bachelor of Science (1914) and an Master of Arts in Architecture (1915) from the University of Pennsylvania. He studied with Professor Franz Studniczka, restoring and photographing sculpture in 1920-1921, and completed his Doctor of Philosophy at Harvard, Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1924.

Career

Clarence Kennedy held a number of teaching positions at Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts. He was an instructor in art history (1917), assistant professor (1921), associate professor (1925; director of a graduate-study program in Paris and Florence), full professor (1930-1931) and chairman of the Art Department (1952-1954). He conducted the Smith College seminar in Florence with his wife in 1957-1960 (summers only), after which he retired from Smith.

Clarence Kennedy was also a Charles Eliot Norton Fellow at Harvard in 1920-1921, a visiting professor of Fine Arts at New York University in 1932 and the Annual Carnegie Professor at Toledo Museum of Art, 1938-1939. He conducted a summer course for the Intercollegiate Council for Summer Study Abroad in 1956, and he was Resident Art Historian with his wife at the American Academy in Rome, 1960-1961.

Achievements

• Clarence Kennedy won a Carnegie Scholarship for study in Florence in 1927, a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1930 and a College Art Association Research Fellowship in 1931-1932.
  
  Clarence Kennedy developed a special stereoscopic camera in 1938-1939, collaborated with the Meriden Gravure Company on the development of collotype, offset processes and other photographic technology in 1938-1939, formed the Cantina Press in 1938 and developed stereo-photography for aerial mapping. With Edwin Land he devised a system for projecting stereoscope slides using Land's Polaroid filters over the lenses of a double projector. Land established the Clarence and Ruth Wedgwood Kennedy Art Fund for the Smith College Art Department in 1959.

Membership

Clarence Kennedy became a member of the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers in 1952 and of Sigma Xi in 1960.

• Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers

  1952

• Sigma Xi

  1960

References

• Macmillan Biographical Encyclopedia of Photographic Artists and Innovators
  1983