Ken Falana Fine Art

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The third born in a family of fourteen children in Flemington, Florida, Ken Falana began drawing in the 1950's and fondly remembers an aunt and uncle, with whom he sometimes lived in St. Petersburg, Florida, taking him to the Ringling Museum in Sarasota. There, he became enamored with classical and Renaissance nude sculpture and began drawing them. Unaware that he was continuing the time-honored, centuries old tradition of copying from a classical nude example, he simply followed his natural inclination to draw.

A graduate of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Falana studied with printmakers Dean Meeker and Warrington Colescott, of which Dean Meeker has the larger impact. After receiving his MFA in 1972, Falana accepted a teaching position at his alma mater, Florida A & M University and has been a consistent contributor in visual arts ever since. Currently, the strongest inspiration for his images and color is based on remembered experiences from growing up in rural Central Florida and the Gulf Coast. Falana's art work reflects the senses and beauty of life as in the enchanting moments of pleasure in the discovery of wild flowers bursting in bloom (reds, yellows, blues, violets and pinks) in spring and summer. Kenneth Falana has executed a number of public commissions. His most significant public works are five large Multicolored silk screened fabric banners for Art-in-Public Places for the Miami Arena, Miami, Florida and a 10x20 ft. multicolored silk screened fabric banner for the Plant Operations and Maintenance Building, Florida A&M University, Tallahassee, Florida.

Falana has exhibited widely with numerous one-person exhibitions including:

* 'Ken Falana - A Retrospective' at the North Carolina Central University Art Museum (Durham, NC)
* 'Ken Falana - Recent Work' at the Armory Art Gallery at Virginia Polytechnical Institute & State University (Blacksburg,VA)
* 'Ken Falana - Color in Motion' at the Center for the Arts (Vero Beach, FL)
* 'Ken Falana --A World of Color' at the Pensacola Museum of Art (Pensacola, FL).


Artist Statement:

Other exhibitions include: 'Where Water Tastes Like Cherry Wine African-American Artists in Florida' at the Polk Museum of Art (Lakeland, FL), 'Contemporary African-American Artist 1980-1994' at the National Art Club (New York,NY),:Highlights from the Wisconsin Union Art Collection - In Honor of the 75th Anniversary' at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (Madison, WI), 'TransAfrican Art' at the Orlando Museum of Art (Orlando, FL), 'African-American Contemporary Art', at the Museum of Contemporary Art (Palermo, Italy), 'Festac 77' in Lagos, Nigeria.
Art Collections

Falana's work can be found in many public and private collections including the Museum of the National Center for Afro-American Artists, Boston, Daytona News Journal, NCCU Art Museum, Florida A&M University, Metro-Dade County Building of Public Administration, Atlanta Life Insurance Company, St. Louis Artists Guild, and the Wisconsin Union Art Collection. He was a Professor of Visual Arts at FAMU for more than thirty years (1972-2007) and he also received FAMU Teacher of the Year award (1998-1999) and serve as chair of the Department of Visual Arts, Humanities & Theatre (2002-2005) and User Agency Representative for the Florida Art in State Buildings Program at Florida A & M University.

Since the early 1970's, my work has involved the creation of prints, drawings, mix-medias, and collages conceptually based on the artistic inspiration of Africa, the civil rights movement and of personal visions. In 1992, I placed importance on craftsmanship, experimented with form, explored the surreal, and began creating dynamic compositions by silk-screening large sheets of color and then invented images as I cut and assembled. I am delving into the essence of an in improvisational style that is spiritually alive, abstract in form and gives a new meaning to expression. The challenge here is to produce something significantly different from anything that I had done before by creating bold and colorful abstract silkscreen collages that suggest natural forms and initiates a passage from nature to abstraction.'You and I,' and 'Flowering Tree' are good representatives of the abstract silkscreen collages.

These collages represent one of the latest evolutions of a collage technique I learned years ago as a student at Florida A & M University. They are bold and colorful, and are derived from remembered experiences of growing up in rural Central Florida, the Florida's Gulf Coast, and the senses of life over the past 60 years. In them life has burst its bounds, joy is taken in the icon of florescence, and color is used for its power over mood and space.

In addition to the current work in abstract collages, I am working on a new series of mix-media pieces on paper in limited editions. They involve the making of small or large collages as Marquette's that are transposed into large mix-media pieces on paper, digitizing the images and combining them with drawing and watercolor. I use the digital image for its texture and resolution, and for it modern artistic diction. I am also relying on my skills as a draftsman to carry the message.