Ben Cunningham--a life with color

the long version

Master of color theory, Ben Cunningham used an intricate structure to formulate his passionate response to visual stimuli. His work combined logic with imagination to add new dimensions to our experience of social confrontation and protest, he reaffirmed the underlying principles of perception that unite humanity. As the critic Lawrence Campbell has observed, he was "in the tradition of the masters of pictorial illusion who sought answers in science to the problems they set for themselves in art and who produced results as irreversible as the invention of photograph and the vacuum tube."