Creator Record
Images
Metadata
Artist |
Ehn, John |
Category |
env builder |
Biography |
John Ehn (1897-1981) Born at a logging camp in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, Johan Henry (John) Ehn worked as a wildlife trapper across the United States and began creating the statues for which he is known when he was in his fifties. He starting building his art environment, "Old Trapper's Lodge," around a motel he owned in Sun Valley, California. Over the course of nearly thirty years, the site filled up with Ehn's painted concrete sculptures depicting folk tale characters and Wild West archetypes as well as tombstones with playful epitaphs. Old Trapper's Lodge was named a California Registered Historical Landmark in 1985. In the late 1980s, many of Ehn's large sculptures were moved to the grounds of Pierce College in Woodland Hills, California. From the objects that remained, Kohler Foundation, Inc., acquired and conserved seventy, including sculpture, tools, signs, and assemblages, before gifting them to the John Michael Kohler Arts Center in 1996. In 2017, an additional Ehn sculpture and painted sign became part of the Arts Center collection through Kohler Foundation, Inc. John Ehn's work was shown in several important group exhibitions over the years including Seymour Rosen's In Celebration of Ourselves at the San Francisco Museum of Art (1976), Divine Disorder at the Triton Museum (1985), and Cat and Ball on a Waterfall: Two Hundred Years of California Folk Painting and Sculpture at the Oakland Museum (1986). More recently, the John Michael Kohler Arts Center exhibited Ehn's work as part of Sublime Spaces and Visionary Worlds (2007) and The Road Less Traveled (2017). |
