Face to Face with Kevin Haas
Assistant Professor Printmaking and Digital Imaging

It's a long way from Chicago to the Palouse and even farther from Pullman to Tokyo and Seoul, but Professor Kevin Haas has made all of those transitions and sees an urban thread running through every place he’s been.

Haas grew up as an only child in St. Louis, Missouri, in a home full of artwork. His parents, he says, should not have been so surprised when he made the big announcement; “I wanted to go to the Art Institute of Chicago,” Haas says. “It’s the only place I wanted to go, the only place I applied.” Haas was accepted to the Art Institute of Chicago, where he received his B.F.A. He received his M.F.A. in printmaking from Indiana University.

In 2000, Haas accepted a position at Washington State University as assistant professor of printmaking and digital imaging. Imagine the culture and landscape of the Palouse as you read the Web site description of his work: “My work explores the urban and industrial landscape through prints, photos, and digital media. It has become a meditation on montage, urban spaces, memory and transience.”

Considering the Palouse is an agricultural rather than industrial world, rural rather than urban, the natural question is: “what’s the urban thread for Haas in Eastern Washington?” Though he lives and teaches here, the bulk of his photography and print work is from the two urban areas he knows best: St. Louis and Chicago. The distance between those urban areas and the WSU campus has simply added another element to his work. Haas explains it this way: “I am actually working based on a thesis that takes into account the distance between me and the settings in the photographs as well as my memory of these things compared to my experience as I was photographing them. It deals with time and place.”

As an example of that, Hass would have us consider his work entitled Chicago Scribed.

Professor Haas recently expanded his urban experience during a two week trip to Tokyo and Seoul. This was his first visit to Asia, and part of an exchange funded by International Programs and the Department of Fine Arts. “The purpose of my trip was to help build a better relationship with the Fine Arts program at Hongik University, the top art program in South Korea.” His visit to Nihon University included a lecture on his work and printmaking in America.

Hass returned with a better understanding of his Asian peers and a deepened respect for their education and their work. “The system is dramatically different,” he says, referring to the education of artists in Asia. “People who want to be artists have to go to a training school to learn the basics. Then they take a test to get in to art school. Only a small percentage makes it. If accepted, they spend a year doing wood cuts, a year doing etchings and a year doing lithography.” The result is technically excellent work. He sees value in such exchange programs because they help us understand that not just the end result, the artwork, is different; “everything leading up to it is different as well. And, there are tremendous differences in the way various cultures view art.”

What are the striking differences in cultures? “In Tokyo and Seoul,” he says, “there is intense movement and noise and at the same time moments of serenity reflected in a home or a garden. By contrast,” he says, “in American cities you often have to travel through economic barriers to find the peace and solitude.”

Will Haas work with the urban photos he took on this trip and incorporate them in prints? No. “I don’t have any connection with the places in these photos,” he says. “For the work I do it’s important to have some emotional attachment to the place. There is a collective memory about the places I photograph. These locations are the backgrounds of daily experiences for thousands of people… seen by everyone but rarely noticed or acknowledged.”

You can experience the work of Professor Haas as well as photographs and video clips of his trip to Asia by visiting his Web site. http://www.accumulated.org/