Artist Ted Kuykendall, who was born December 5, 1953, died on October 5, 2009 in Roswell, New Mexico at the age of 56. This handwritten quote hung on the wall of Kuykendall’s studio: The face of truth remains hidden behind a circle of gold.

Ted Kuykendall was a private man who worked hard at all that he laid his hands to. Friends have described Kuykendall as a “jack of all trades and a master of most.” He worked for over 30 years as a carpenter and cabinetmaker to earn a living in order to continue his work in the studio.

Kuykendall’s early years were spent in Roswell and southeastern New Mexico. As a youth he attended the New Mexico Military Institute. Kuykendall met the sculptor Luis Jimenez in 1973, and after spending a day working with Jimenez his worldview changed. He left knowing that he was to be an artist. Ted went on to apprentice with Jimenez from 1973 to 1976. They became lifelong friends and Jimenez was a great advocate of Kuykendall’s work.

In 1975, while working with Jimenez, Ted Kuykendall purchased his first camera and started shooting photographs. During this time, he had the good fortune to meet and become friends with several artists and mentors at the Roswell Artist-in-Residence Program—under the patronage of Donald Anderson.

Kuykendall enrolled at the University of New Mexico (UNM) to study photography from 1976-1981; it was during this period that he developed a documentary style that captured his world with the click of the shutter. Yet it was through the time that Kuykendall spent honing his craft in the darkroom that his true vision began to emerge from shadow and light. His fearless experimentation with various darkroom processes created new territory for Kuykendall to explore.

While at UNM Kuykendall studied under Beaumont Newhall and Van Deren Coke, both eminent photographers and photo-historians. In later years Coke would write, “Ted Kuykendall, like a clairvoyant impresario, creates puzzling pictures full of wonders that draw us into a fragile synthesis of anonymity and frightening intimacy. As a consequence, his pictures provide an escape from the mundane world into surreal spaces.”

From 1985-1987 Ted Kuykendall was awarded a Roswell Artist-in-Residence Program Fellowship. The “Gift of Time” provided him the opportunity to develop cinematic sculptural environments to be photographed. The images were printed on a heroic scale and masterfully manipulated by his experiential developing process, creating images that resound as veils of truth.

The powerful photographs that resulted over 34 years reside in many private and public collections including the National Gallery of American Art, Anderson Museum of Contemporary Art, Roswell Museum and Art Center, New Mexico Museum of Art, Albuquerque Museum, Denver Art Museum, New Orleans Museum of Art, and Ohio Wesleyan University.