Remembering Kenn Morgan
by :
Ed Cardoni
Published in May, 2020 in the early days of the Coronavirus Pandemic. Issue 3 of Cornelia was virtual only.
Kenn Morgan, image courtesy of Dave Corbett.
Our beloved friend Kenn Morgan died earlier this summer. It wasn’t of COVID-19 like his fellow, similarly beloved Buffalo-based photographer, John Pfahl, earlier this spring, nor tragically young, like his fellow Locust Street Neighborhood Art Classes teacher, Lenore Bethel-Cooper, who was lost to our close-knit art community at just 40 years old, and who was as much family to Kenn as a coworker. No, Kenn died at a reasonable age, peacefully, in his sleep, of natural causes, over the night of Sunday–Monday, May 31–June 1. Nevertheless, this week, with all we are in the middle of, I can’t help beginning this brief personal remembrance with these words: Kenn Morgan was one of the Black Lives that Matter. One of the Teachers’ Lives that Matter. One of the Artists’ Lives that Matter.
As so many mutual friends in the Buffalo art community have been sharing their photos and stories of Kenn on social media over the months, as I have, I have come to realize that many were far closer to Kenn than I. But I knew and loved him for at least 25 years, since Hallwalls hosted the 35th-anniversary exhibition of the MollyOlga Neighborhood Art Classes (then so-called, for its co-founders, since changed to Locust Street, for its address) in our Tri-Main Center galleries in the summer of 1995. The very same day news of Kenn’s death started showing up in friends’ Facebook posts—June 1, 2020—Facebook also “notified” me that it was Locust Street’s 61st birthday.
Photo by Kenn Morgan. Courtesy Locust Street Arts.
Kenn was a passionate photographer and a teacher of free photography classes to generations of mostly East Side (including Fruit Belt) children, as well as many adults. In a photo snapped by Dave Corbett and posted on Facebook, Kenn—presumably at an outdoor concert, maybe on Bidwell Parkway—is looking back over his shoulder, the hand-lettered sign wired to the back of his lawn chair says, “CITY of BUFFALO PHOTOGRAPHY AMBASSADOR AND PHOTO COACH,” a self-bestowed and accurate title. He taught photography to students as an art form, like the painting and sculpture also taught at Locust Street, not just as a hobby or a skill. And he was a holdout: he stuck with film—color for snapshots of people, black and white for his art—and taught darkroom processing of film and printing on paper in chemical baths long after most photographers and photography teachers had reluctantly surrendered to digital.
Where I mostly saw Kenn (and it was A LOT) was at art openings, chatting it up with friends, chowing down on the free refreshments. I’m known for going to and eating at a lot of art openings every month, and I take pride in that. But as many openings as I go to (other than during pandemics, of course), Kenn went to many more; he was at every opening I went to and then some. At openings, with my iPhone, I take and immediately post pictures of the art, but what Kenn would do is whip out one of his point-and-shoot cameras and take quick, one-handed candid shots of small groups of people, which meant small groups of his friends, because all of us were his friends. Later he would print them out and, at some future opening, casually give small prints to the people in the pictures.
If art openings hadn’t been canceled since Hallwalls’ own opening on Friday, March 13, I would surely have seen him at dozens of openings over the past 12 weeks, taking all of our pictures. Kenn was a gregarious man, far more so even than I, I hope the isolation didn’t contribute to his death. And when we can finally reopen our gallery, all the galleries, we will not see him there. We will never see him again. But we will feel his absence, and we will remember him. And then there are all the people he taught how to take and make pictures. And then, of course, all of his pictures.
Ed Cardoni is the Executive Director of Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center.
