Ida Kohlmeyer

Ida Kohlmeyer was inspired to go to art school when she was almost forty years of age, and encountered examples of Mexican ceramic folk art. She graduated with a master’s degree in drawing and painting from Newcomb Art School in 1956 and went to New York to study with the abstract expressionist painter Hans Hofmann. Hofmann had a huge impact on Kohlmeyer’s work, persuading her to abandon figurative painting in favor of abstraction. Her arrangements of brightly colored patterns on canvas gradually translated into sculpture, ranging from simple, painted cubes to twenty-foot-high constructions of abstract shapes.