Their Own Public Idaho: The Kienholzes in Hope
In 1973, newlywed artists Edward Kienholz (1927-1994) and Nancy Reddin Kienholz (1943-2019) purchased a lakeside plot on a small peninsula in the northern Idaho panhandle. They soon moved their family from Los Angeles, California to this bucolic site with sprawling views of Lake Pend Oreille, located just past the town limits of Hope, Idaho, current population 100, which was half that in the 1970s. The artist-couple would split their time between Hope and their studio in West Berlin, until Ed’s unexpected death in 1994.
During the two decades the Kienholzes lived together in Hope, they built a multi-structure compound, launched a world-class gallery with an illustrious exhibition program, and started an artist residency program. They also hosted legendary parties and outdoor excursions, all while maintaining an ambitious and respected artistic practice and exhibiting at major institutions around the world. Their committed endeavors transformed the Hope compound into a crossroads for local, regional, and international art worlds, and particularly, opened up new avenues for artistic exchange between the inland Northwest and cosmopolitan cities across North America and Europe.
Although the Kienholzes’ mutual impact on the art and culture of the inland Northwest was widely acknowledged during Ed’s lifetime, it has since faded from memory, persisting more as regional lore than in the art historical record. Yet, when isolated from this geographic origin, their critical and often self-implicating investigations of fraught and politically charged themes—including the legacies of settler colonialism and Indigenous dispossession, racial and sexual violence, religious conservativism, reproductive rights, social alienation, and environmental destruction— lacks necessary context, leaving some of the most timely and defiant dimensions of their work hidden in plain sight.
Taking its name from the location where Ed and Nancy sought to merge art with life, Beyond Hope: Kienholz and the Inland Northwest illuminates their longstanding and underexplored connections to a region of the United States that is often excluded from art historical consideration. Taking its cues from the artists themselves, this exhibition explores the idea of place as a generative context for the Kienholzes’ subversive artistic practice. Demonstrating how regions often deemed marginal, conservative, and rear-guard—such as northern Idaho—have in fact offered fertile ground for artistic experimentation, risk, and critique, Beyond Hope also gives shape to the ways that radical histories of American art are not confined to the country’s coastlines and urban centers, and can in fact be found in the most unlikely of places.
Ed Kienholz was no outsider to the inland Northwest. Born and raised on a farm in eastern Washington along the Idaho border, he spent the majority of his life in these two states. Even so, Kienholz’s two decades in Los Angeles tend to eclipse his longer and more consistent affiliation with the inland Northwest, largely due to his tendency to stoke controversy in the city’s fledgling postwar art scene. After settling in Los Angeles in 1952 and co-founding the legendary Ferus Gallery with curator Walter Hopps in 1957, Kienholz became known, even infamous, for life-size immersive environments and assemblages featuring shocking, often violent and lurid content, such as Roxys (1961-62) and Back Seat Dodge ’38 (1964). These and other works featured in Kienholz’s exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1966 elicited harsh condemnation from local officials, resulting in feverish media attention, and, in turn, huge crowds.[1] In 1972, Ed met Nancy Reddin at a party hosted by her parents. Her father, Tom Reddin, had recently resigned as chief of the Los Angeles Police Department to launch a bid for mayor, which made her and Ed’s marriage—her second, his fifth—particularly charged, considering Ed’s reputation for flouting obscenity laws and provoking police raids.
After moving to Hope, Ed’s defiant stance towards state authority found expression through more official avenues. For instance, in the mid-1980s, the couple grew determined to have their Hope compound legally recognized as a large-scale art work in its own right. They launched a legal campaign and solicited support from an international network of artists, curators, collectors, and friends, who they asked to write statements confirming that the studio was a “fine art sculpture” and thus should be declared tax exempt. Like all aspects of the Kienholzes’ practice, this crusade was at once irreverently tongue-in-cheek yet also reflected an earnest belief in the transformative, even liberatory potential of art in and for the public sphere.
Defining the compound as an art work was both a conceptual provocation and a practical concern. In correspondence with their gallerist, Peter Goulds of L.A. Louver, Ed and Nancy defined the site as a collection of “in-use environments” encompassing both buildings and outdoor sculptural installations, and noted that the compound was “a good piece of Kienholz art […] signed as such” (Fig. 2-5).[2] Ed and Nancy went so far as to purchase ad space in the February 1985 issue of Art in America, announcing the debut of “Seven On Site Use Environments,” which included a list of structures on the property, all of which would be “shown by appointment only / prices on request” (Fig. 6).
The term the Kienholzes chose for this conceptual project, “on site use environments,” implies a collapse of the boundary between art and life, between aesthetic and everyday experience, and in this sense taps into a rich historical vein of utopian aspiration long fostered by artistic avant-gardes. And yet, at first glance, their sustained and coordinated effort to evade taxation could also be seen to align them, ideologically and geographically, with various anti-government movements based in the inland Northwest, and particularly in northern Idaho. Since at least the 1970s, this region has become known as a destination for fringe groups seeking to distance themselves from mainstream society, a safe haven where they can operate free from government interference. Many such groups espouse extremist politics, fundamentalist religious beliefs, and hate-based ideologies like white supremacy, Christian ethno-nationalism, and anti-LGBTQ violence, all of which the Kienholzes—as liberal, pro-peace atheists—deeply opposed.[3] Crucially, Ed and Nancy’s letter to Peter Goulds makes clear that their campaign was not rooted in extremist anti-government sentiment (that is, besides run-of-the-mill irritation towards government bureaucracy), but rather, in an insistence that their activities were in service to the public good, constituted a form of environmental art, and thus merited tax exemption; in their words: “Win or loose [sic] it should make for an interesting landmark case as public service people seem to have stood in the self-service line far too long.”
Using the Hope compound as a point of entry, the works and materials gathered in Beyond Hope explore the significance of the inland Northwest’s landscape and culture in the Kienholzes’ practice, beginning with Ed’s early conceptual works of the 1960s and then his and Nancy’s collaborative work from the 1970s onwards. Curatorially, the exhibition shifts its focus away from Kienholz’s signature style of graphic imagery and disturbing scenarios in favor of a subtler and more introspective aesthetic, expressed through text-based conceptual propositions (such as The Concept Tableaux, watercolors, and The Non-War Memorial); abstract, formalist, found-object assemblages (The H.I.D. Series and White Easel Series); and finally, works that subtly subvert and complicate stereotypes of the Western “pioneer” (The Returning, Mine Camp). Taken together, these works illuminate a lesser-known dimension of the Kienholz oeuvre that is no less politically confrontational, formally scrupulous, or conceptually rigorous than the major works Ed produced in Los Angeles in the 1950s and ’60s. Notably, many of the assemblages on view—including The H.I.D. Series, The White Easel Series, The Returning, Drawing for the Jesus Corner, and the two television-based works—are composed of, and in some cases combine, found objects and artifacts collected from their environment in the inland Northwest and from German flea markets, reinforcing the material, geographic, and conceptual links between Hope and West Berlin that their collaborative practice consistently foregrounds.[4]
Besides works of art, Beyond Hope also features rarely-seen photographs and print ephemera, including posters, promotional materials and catalogues for exhibitions held in Washington and Idaho, printed materials from the compound’s residency program, and catalogues from its exhibition space, which they winkingly christened The Faith and Charity in Hope Gallery (Fig. 7). Drawn from the compound’s archives, these materials reveal an illustrious gallery program featuring major artists such as Francis Bacon, Jay DeFeo, Sam Francis, Alberto Giacometti, Jasper Johns, and Emil Nolde, alongside regional artists and friends of the Kienholzes based in the Northwest and in Houston, Texas, where they began spending part of the year in 1991.
Exhibitions were occasionally facilitated or guest curated by prominent art world friends such as Jörn Merkert, then Secretary of the Fine Arts Department of of the Akademie der Künste in West Berlin, who curated the gallery’s Bacon exhibition; and Knud W. Jensen, founder and director of the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, who personally couriered the Giacometti sculptures from Denmark to Hope (Fig. 8-10). Gallery openings were notoriously social affairs in which visitors would travel from far and wide, vying to be invited back to the Kienholz residence late night parties where Ed and Nancy would hold court, cigarettes in hand. The couple often invited out-of-town guests to participate in outdoor activities such as fishing, horseback riding, and hunting, as documented in a 1987 home movie filmed by longtime family friend Tamara (Tammy) Helm, where Ed is accompanied on a pheasant hunting trip on the Palouse by Tammy’s husband, the Washington artist Robert (Bob) Helm, and the Australian art critic Robert Hughes (Fig. 11). In another pair of photographs shot during a hunting trip on the Palouse, Ed is photographed alongside members of his and the Helm family, surveying the land before him with a look of familiarity and admiration, but also, a sense of belonging and stewardship (Fig. 12, 13).
Beyond their activities in Hope, the Kienholzes regularly participated in exhibitions across the broader Northwest region—from Missoula to Seattle, Portland to Boise—including their immediate environs of northern Idaho and eastern Washington. Their investment in the local art scene is evidenced by a poster for Ed’s solo exhibition at the University of Idaho Art Gallery in Moscow, ID, “Edward Kienholz: Sculpture 1976-1979,” which was mounted in October 1979 and then traveled west to the Henry Art Gallery in Seattle for the remainder of the year (Fig. 14). Though the title names only Ed, the exhibition’s poster features a detail from a work that he made in collaboration with Nancy (as were all works produced after 1973), a mixed-media assemblage titled The Returning (1976) (Fig. 15). The work’s central image is a vintage photograph of a group of mostly elderly white people trudging through an agricultural landscape, dressed in their Sunday best. In this respect, The Returning not only resonates with Kienholz’s family history, it offers a meditation on his own migratory homecomings—from Los Angeles to rural Idaho, as well as from the United States to his ancestral Germany, where he and Nancy spent half the year—and the fraught historical returns that echo through these journeys.
Perhaps Kienholz chose The Returning to illustrate his 1979 exhibition poster because the landscape depicted in the found photograph at its center resembles the Palouse, the name given to the region of the inland Northwest in which both the University of Idaho and Washington State University campuses are located. Known for its rolling hills and fertile soil, the Palouse takes its name from the land’s original Indigenous inhabitants, a permanent reminder of the violent legacies of Indigenous dispossession that enabled the founding of the region’s two prominent “land grant” universities.[5] The Returning offers a subtle reflection on this historical context by depicting the process of return not as a heroic singular event, but as an ambiguous and unstable process characterized by ritual, repetition, and repression. The work deploys visual echoes and ambiguous materials to raise questions about not just where its central landscape is located, but whether the figures populating it are indigenous or settlers, forcing us to contend with the fact that not everyone is permitted to return to their ancestral home.
Like The Returning, one of the most affecting works in Beyond Hope similarly deploys allegory and ambiguity to invite the viewer to consider the relationship between colonial violence, both at home and abroad. The Non-War Memorial (1970) (Fig. 16) is an expanded concept tableau that Kienholz developed as an allegorical response to the human and environmental fallout of the Vietnam War, which by 1970 had claimed the lives of over 48,000 American soldiers and many, many more Southeast Asians. In the work’s enigmatic opening statement, Kienholz alludes to this ongoing conflict while linking it to the United States’ own violent history: “America has long engaged in a civil war (theirs) testing whether our nation or any nation so deceived and so divided can long endure.”
The premise of The Non-War Memorial is that a group of volunteers consisting of “artists, students, and activists” and local residents (a demography that, at that time, would inevitably include multiple generations of veterans) would be invited to northern Idaho to build a large-scale art installation. Over the summer months, the volunteers would collectively pack 50,000 surplus U.S. military uniforms with slurried clay, and then scatter these uniforms across a 75-acre meadow near the town of Clark Fork, Idaho, located just a few miles south of Hope and less than ten minutes’ drive from the Montana border. Kienholz notes that the meadow’s current vegetation would be “plowed under and perhaps the soil killed chemically”—a chilling reference to the U.S. military’s rampant use of chemical weaponry, like the poisonous herbicide Agent Orange, which destroyed crops and poisoned generations of Vietnamese civilians and U.S. servicemen. Then, the uniforms would be laid out and allowed to rot over a period of five years, under the supervision of a museum. Once the fabric and clay dissolve and seep into the soil, the field would be plowed again and replanted with alfalfa, a return to order that conceals multiple seasons of death and decay.
As a gallery-based installation, The Non-War Memorial consists of a plaque and text-based description, surrounded by five sand-stuffed uniforms that are strewn across the floor like fallen soldiers on a battlefield. The uniforms are arranged around a hefty, black tome (Fig. 17), which is comprised of over a thousand gridded pages of black-and-white photographs featuring unmarked uniforms and hand-scrawled notes referencing the rising death count in Vietnam—a stark reminder of loss and destruction, utterly devoid of sentimentality.
The Non-War Memorial refuses conventional methods of memorialization, such as depicting heroic soldiers in battle or listing names of the fallen. Eschewing representation and identification, the work instead renders the devastating human costs of war through allegory, absence, anonymity, and, in the case of The Non-War Memorial’s proposed land art project, a durational metaphor that unfolds across seasons and years, with lasting, even permanent consequences on the environment. Though it was conceived as a response to the U.S.’s military actions abroad, the concept tableau’s opening reference to “a great civil war” and “our nation” implies a historical link between the civil war in Vietnam in which the United States was then embroiled, the American Civil War that pitted north against south a century earlier; moreover, it suggests a broader analogy between Civil War and the bipolar political order of the Cold War. And yet, when viewed through a regional lens, The Non-War Memorial could also reference more geographically-specific human and environmental atrocities, such as the Nez Perce Wars of the 1870s, which devastated the region’s Native population and dispossessed them of the territories that would ultimately constitute the state of Idaho when it was officially admitted into the Union in 1890.[6] In this sense, The Non-War Memorial functions more as a historical reckoning than a commemoration of the past, one anchored in a sober acknowledgment of how cycles of violence ebb and flow across history and geography, their traces enduring like a poisonous slurry that leaches into the soil.
The Kienholzes’ acknowledgment of regional histories and their violent legacies is nowhere more apparent than in an installation on the second floor of the Hope studio, called The Billy Bar (1988) (Fig. 18-22). This fully-functioning bar is reminiscent of another landmark Kienholz work, The Beanery (1965), a life-size replica of the interior of Barney’s Beanery, a famous Los Angeles watering hole that Ed and his friends frequented during his Ferus Gallery years. Like its precursor, The Billy Bar recreates a real bar and its patrons, replete with neon signs, kitschy memorabilia, and life-size sculptural portraits of a local bartender and regular from a bar in Clark Fork, the neighboring town that was also the proposed site for The Non-War Memorial. Encased under the poured resin surface of the bar itself is a densely-layered display of photographs, newspaper clippings, and print ephemera related to the history of the northern Idaho panhandle after the arrival of European migrants. These archival materials depict the region’s pre-treaty inhabitants alongside the white settlers—homesteaders, farmers, miners, hunters and trappers—who rapidly and often violently displaced them. Importantly, The Billy Bar’s ambiguous historical display is neither a clearcut celebration nor condemnation of settler colonialism. Instead, embedding this historical documentation into a space of conviviality and leisure, one that is integrated within the architecture of their own studio, is a testament to the Kienholzes’ willingness to confront their own positionalities as settlers, and situate this tension at the very heart of their daily existence in Hope.
When considered against the backdrop of regional history, the Kienholzes’ life in Hope and the works of art they positioned there, such as The Non-War Memorial and The Billy Bar, suggest a paradox: on the one hand, they express a utopian aspiration to make art for the public good, and on the other, a competing desire to retreat from modern society’s corrupting influences into a private world. These contradictions would not have been lost on Ed and Nancy; indeed, they may have even motivated their decision to leave Los Angeles and settle in a part of the world that Ed’s family had called home for generations. The political tensions that animated their work post-Hope should be understood as an extension of the frictions that characterized Ed’s lifelong relationship to the inland Northwest, to his own family, and to his ancestry as a European, and specifically German, settler.[7]
Importantly, though, Ed and Nancy’s investment in the regional scene did not require them to isolate from the rest of the world. Their annual circuit between Hope and West Berlin compelled them to constantly shift perspectives and draw comparisons that exerted pressure on many of the central mythologies of American exceptionalism. Even so, the inland Northwest did not simply function as a bucolic refuge or rustic counterpart to the urbane European existence they enjoyed the other half of the year. As Ed’s familial place of origin, it could never be a blank slate, for it carried deep biographical and historical significance steeped in both nostalgia and trauma.[8] Ed and Nancy’s decades-long efforts to shore up the local art scene in Hope while actively participating in the broader regional art scene testify to their commitment to using art to combat parochialism as a form of public service. This shared conviction is manifested in a body of work that makes visible the complex structures of patriarchal, white supremacist, and ecological violence that have been central to the historical unfolding of settler colonialism on the American frontier, and remain so to those hate groups that flock to northern Idaho to this day.[9]
Considering its reputation for extremist ideologies, religious fundamentalism, and rural isolation, the northern Idaho panhandle was and remains an incongruous environment for a pair of subversive, defiant, internationally-acclaimed artists to call home. And yet, this unlikely context is what enabled Ed and Nancy to test and develop new ideas at a physical remove from the art world, all the while remaining directly, and provocatively, engaged with it. Looking closely at their activities in Hope reveals that, far from being covert right-wing sympathizers, they intentionally embraced contradiction, friction, and ambiguity as an ethical position from which to practice art as a public service, and possibly even as a self-conscious strategy for fending off the art world’s most inward-looking, self-righteous, and navel-gazing tendencies. Conceived of as an “on site use environment,” the Hope compound offered the Kienholzes a rich historical and conceptual territory for reimagining their art and which publics it could engage. Beyond Hope brings their vision—in all its internal contradiction, ambivalence, and frank self-assessment—into sharper focus, and in doing so, expands our understanding of their groundbreaking work as well as the geographic horizons of 20th century American art history.
Acknowledgements
First and foremost, I would like to thank the entire team at the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art at Washington State University for their steadfast work and determination to organize this ambitious exhibition. I would also like to thank Ryan Hardesty for partnering on this project from its earliest stages, and generously sharing his insights and vision along the way.
This project would not have been possible without Lisa Jann, Managing Director and Lauren Graber, Head Archivist and Research Specialist at L.A. Louver Gallery. Lisa’s and Lauren’s profound efforts, insights, and comradeship during the many years of research and planning that went into this project were indispensable. Additionally, I would like to thank Matthew Emonson, Assistant Archivist, and Christopher Pate, Director of Collections and Facilities, for their work finalizing photographs and loans.
Finally, I want to sincerely thank Stillman Berkley for his expertise and support in facilitating and installing this exhibition, and Daryl and Sherry Witcraft for their gracious hospitality, assistance, and storytelling during our memorable visit to Hope in September 2022.
About the Author
Johanna Gosse is a London-based art historian and curator, and Lecturer in Lens and Time-Based Art Histories at the Courtauld Institute of Art. From 2023-24, Johanna is the Terra Foundation for American Art Visiting Professor in the Department of History of Art and the University of Oxford. From 2018-23, she was Assistant Professor of Art History & Visual Culture at the University of Idaho in Moscow, Idaho, a period during which she extensively researched the Kienholzes’ life and work in the inland Northwest in preparation for this exhibition.
Banner Image: Edward Kienholz and Nancy Reddin Kienholz, Mine Camp, 1991. © Estate of Nancy Reddin Kienholz. Courtesy of L.A. Louver, Venice, CA.
[1] The Los Angeles Board of County Supervisors deemed these two works in particular to be pornographic and attempted to limit viewers’ access—for instance, by requiring the Dodge’s door to remain closed unless an adult over 18 requested it be opened. Such craven attempts at censorship predictably backfired, generating even larger crowds and more media attention, and effectively cemented Kienholz’s international reputation as an art world provocateur.
[2] Letter from Edward Kienholz and Nancy Reddin Kienholz to Peter Goulds, January 19, 1988. Collection of L.A. Louver Gallery.
[3] Perhaps the most famous of these groups is Aryan Nations, a neo-Nazi terrorist network active between the 1970s and early 2000s whose headquarters was located outside Hayden Lake, Idaho, a suburb of Coeur d’Alene in Kootenai County. As of 2024, the Southern Poverty Law Center lists 21 active hate groups currently operating in the state, with a strong concentration located in the northern Idaho Panhandle around Coeur d’Alene and Priest River, which are about an hour’s drive south and west of Hope, respectively.
[4] The present essay, which was written to accompany the exhibition Beyond Hope, is an excerpt from a longer, forthcoming research article that situates the Kienholzes’ practice in the geopolitical context of the inland Northwest. This article pays particular attention to the conceptual links between their site-specific work in northern Idaho and their studio practice in West Berlin, and their subsequent exploration of historical parallels between American settler colonialism and German fascism.
[5] The Morrill Land-Grant Act of 1862 enabled the founding of multiple “land grant” public universities across the United States, including the University of Idaho and Washington State University. Land grant university endowments were funded through the proceeds from the sale of nearly eleven million of acres of Native land that the U.S. federal government seized from tribes through forced expulsion, war, and other violent means. See Robert Lee and Tristan Ahtone, “Land-Grab Universities,” High Country News (30 March 2020): https://www.hcn.org/issues/52.4/indigenous-affairs-education-land-grab-universities.
[6] Though the major battles of the Nez Perce Wars occurred further south of the Panhandle, in the vicinity of current-day Nez Perce reservations and stretching east into Montana, they are representative of the broader histories of violent conflict between settlers and natives across the region.
[7] Kienholz hailed from a prominent eastern Washington Republican family, with relatives who are still active in Spokane city politics, and publicly tout their family’s role in electing Ronald Reagan as President in 1980.
[8] Nancy Reddin Kienholz’s “Chronology” text for their 1996 retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art refers to Ed’s father as a “stern, cruel, and angry man,” who regularly physically abused his son. Her “Chronology” includes a statement from Ed’s sister Shirley Kienholz White, who notes that their paternal grandfather was crueler than their father, but that “Ed broke this chain of abuse with his own children. He never even spanked them.” Nancy Reddin Kienholz, “Chronology,” Kienholz: A Retrospective (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1996), 248. Much closer to his mother, Ed often expressed ambivalence towards his father; that said, autobiographical works like Mine Camp indicate paternal identification and fondness via its representation of shared past times, like camping and hunting.
[9] Historian Richard Slotkin carefully analyzes the United States’ frontier mythology and its afterlife in postwar American culture in Richard Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998).