Windermere real estate Mount Baker Fall 2025 Fall art show
and Hannah Palin
present
Kenneth Showell:
A Daughter Curates Her Father’s Legacy
Reception
October 29, 2025• 5:30pm - 8:00pm
Windermere Real Estate Mount baker • 4919 South Genesee Street• Seattle Wa 98121
THE SHOW
In 2018, Hannah Palin, a Seattle film archivist, received a storage pod filled with work created by her biological father, Kenneth Showell, a New York painter and photographer who died in 1997. Palin spent years documenting, researching, and organizing her inheritance of over 1300 canvases, drawings, pastels, lithographs, and watercolors.
Hannah Palin Presents Kenneth Showell: A Daughter Curates Her Father’s Legacy encompasses a broad range of Showell’s work. His abstract paintings of the mid-1970s - early 1980s were pivotal linking his early Lyrical Abstracts to his later Landscapes. It is during this time that he experimented with style and form, ultimately leaving abstraction behind for plein air painting and representational works.
The opening reception for Hannah Palin Presents Kenneth Showell: A Daughter Curates Her Father’s Legacy is at Windermere Real Estate Mount Baker on October 29th from 5:30pm - 8:00pm. The show is currently available for viewing during regular business hours or by appointment at all other times, and runs through mid-November, 2025.
BIOGRAPHY
The son of a sheet metal worker, Kenneth Leroy Showell was born in 1939 in Huron, South Dakota and grew up in Omaha, Nebraska. After receiving his B.F.A. at the Kansas City Art Institute and an M.F.A. from Indiana University he moved to New York City in 1965, setting up a studio in SoHo. Ken’s abstract work with spray paint and folded canvas garnered significant attention. His distinctive approach earned inclusion in the 1967 and 1969 Annual Exhibition: Contemporary American Painting at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Showell was also included in the Whitney’s 1971 Lyrical Abstraction exhibition, and many other important group shows and surveys of contemporary painting. His work is held by prominent museums, such as the Museum of Modern Art and the National Gallery of Art.
From the late 1960s to the early 1970s, Showell was represented by the prestigious David Whitney Gallery which featured the work of painters such as Dan Christiansen, Mary Heilmann, Ronnie Landfield, Pat Lipsky, and David Reed. These artists, along with Showell, were eventually grouped under the heading Lyrical Abstraction, a term coined by the collector Larry Aldrich to describe those painters who were moving away from the "geometric, hard-edge, and minimal, toward more lyrical, sensuous, romantic abstractions in colors which are softer and more vibrant.”
In the 1980s Showell’s interest drifted to landscape and plein air painting. He began to explore computer generated and video imagery as part of his creative practice. He would bring a Hi-8 video camera to Central Park, focus it on scenes he found interesting, and record until the tape came to an end. Afterwards he would return to his studio and paint directly from the image captured on videotape. The process gave his paintings a quality of motion even though his subjects, such as a skyline or a tree, were inherently static.
KENNETH SHOWELL ARTWORKS
Kenneth Showell Artworks was established to manage the Kenneth Showell collection and to handle donations, sales, licensing, and merchandise
For more information:
Hannah Palin, kennethshowellartworks@gmail.com, (206) 321-8301