Background
Kilstrom was born in Chicago, Illinois, on December 25, 1922.
Kilstrom was born in Chicago, Illinois, on December 25, 1922.
Kilstrom attended J. Sterling Morton High School in Cicero, Illinois, where he was a member of the National Honor Society. He attended the University of Illinois (1942-1943) and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (1943-1944).
He was primarily known as Kenneth Kilstrom. While working with Hayter in his New York Atelier 17 in 1948, he became the first artist known to have used the direct transfer of "real world" photographic imagery on to an intaglio printing plate as an element in a composition in his work "Attack on Marshall Gilbert". Kilstrom produced fifteen of these prints, two of which are held by the National Archives and the Fogg Museum at Harvard University.
He was an only child, the son of optometrist Harold Robert and Hulda Nelson Kilstrom.
He was awarded a scholarship for art to the Cooper Union in 1945, where he attended briefly, before accepting an apprenticeship with Isamu Noguchi (1945-1947). Kilstrom worked mainly as a printmaker in the 1940s and early 1950s, exhibiting in Chicago, Philadelphia and New New York
Kilstrom was committed to a psychiatric institution for much of the 1950s and early 1960s but was released, based on the success of a nearly sold out showing of his work at the Tanager Gallery in New York in 1961, with the assistance of Resnick and Pasloff. Kilstrom focused primarily on painting after that time.
Museum of Modern Art (Museum of Modern Art), "76 Jefferson Streeters Show", 1975
Roswell Museum and Art Center, Roswell, New Mexico, 1971
Fishbach Gallery, New York City, 1964-1966
Zabriske Gallery, New York City, 1963, 1964, 1966
Tanager Gallery, New York City, 1961
Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago, 1949
Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, 1948
Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, District of Columbia Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indianapolis, Indiana
Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort
Worth, Texas
Museum of Art and Archaeology, University of Missouri, Columbia, Missouri
Anderson Museum of Contemporary Art, Roswell, New Mexico
Roswell Museum and Art Center, Roswell, New Mexico
Fogg Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge, Master of Arts
Museum of Contemporary Art, University of São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil
Brooklyn Museum, New York, New New York
He was an apprentice of Isamu Noguchi and a member of Stanley Hayter"s Atelier 17.