A true Pasadena native, Walter Askin has had a long career as an artist, a curator, and author, and teacher. His primary medium is painting, but he also dabbles in sculpture, printmaking, and other mediums. Askin was born in Pasadena in 1929. From a young age he experimented with different types of artwork. He received both his BA and MA from UC Berkeley. He has had dozens of solo and gorup exhibitions around the world, including his artworks being shown at the Kunslerhaus in Vienna, Austria; the MOMA and the Whitney Museum of Art in New York City; and various others. Since the beginning of his career he has formed collaborative relationships with other artists and forming artists groups wherein the artists can work together, collaborate, and give and receive feedback. Askin spend many decades as a teacher, teaching from junior high level through college, all the while creating artworks and continuing to learn more and refine his own style. Walter Askin is known for his imaginative and humorous pieces that often shift the viewer's expectations of familiar objects and themes. Many of his pieces are also tinged with satire as he uses his artistic expression to bring mankind's perceptions of their greatness back down to reality. See a collection of Askin's work this spring and summer at the BYU Museum of Art in the new exhibition,
Reality Reorganized: Walter Askin and Wayne Kimball's Mysterious Discursions, open April 13 - August 27, 2016. Image: Walter Askin,
Christopher Columbus Returns from the New World with the Four Basic Food Groups to Queen Isabella Levitating and Oskar Kokoschka in a Funk, Acrylic on canvas, 1991. Image courtesy of the artist.