In Memorium: Jim Kraft
Artist, Educator Helped Others to Learn Craft

Artist Jim Kraft is remembered for his multifaceted creativity
and willingness to share his ideas to help other artists achieve
their vision.

"You would say to Jim, 'Well, I'm thinking of doing such and
such ...,' and he would jump in," said artist and friend Beverley
Magennis. "He was just with you in a most generous, wholehearted,
full-spirited way. He was an incredible support to so many people."

Kraft died in his sleep Sunday (September 9, 2007) at his Albuquerque home. He was
69. Memorial service plans were pending.

"He's going to be missed by a lot of people, because there are
hundreds of people that he worked with," said Wesley Pulkka, Journal
art critic. "He really helped them learn their craft."

One of those artists was Douglas Kent Hall. He met Kraft in the
1970s, when Hall was working on a print of one of his Jimi Hendrix
pictures.

At Unified Arts, a collaborative studio that Kraft and his wife
and partner, Judy Booth, have run for years, Hall lived in an
apartment and worked on the silk-screen project.

He subsequently worked with Kraft on other projects, including
prints that involved digital images.
"We would sit and look at these images and go through our little
bag of tricks and come up with something that really worked," Hall
said. "That was kind of what Jim was like."

"Jim was a guy that you kind of told what you wanted and he was
smart enough to figure out how to do it," he said.

Kraft was a great artist in his own right, Magennis said.
"It's hard to really talk about Jim on one category because he
was so creative in so many directions," she said. "It's kind of hard
to say he was a photographer; he was a printmaker.
"He was all of those things."

Pulkka in a 2005 retrospective named Kraft "artist of the year."
It was that year, after 40 years of forming his own work and helping
fellow artists, that Kraft had his first solo exhibit.

The Harwood Art Center show featured mixed-media prints that
incorporated ideas from Kraft's years as a professor, printmaker and
artist.

"Computer-generated graphics have been part of Kraft's creative
output for many years," Pulkka wrote about the show. "His new work
utilizes computer-generated and enhanced imagery that is cut up and
layered back together in collage form. Parts of the images are then
hand-varnished to isolate and intensify their color and form."

"His innovative approach to photography and printmaking includes
his use of photo emulsion to transfer photographs onto 3-D objects
like brooms, shoes and shoe boxes that he made more than 30 years
ago."

Pulkka was introduced to Kraft's photo emulsion work years ago
and thought it was "brilliant."
"He was very much like a surrealist artist from the 1930s,"
Pulkka told the Journal.

Kraft, at the time of the 2005 show, said, "I'm embracing some
of the early 3-D images and bringing them forward with collage,
computer-print fragments and some hand work.

Kraft, born in Evanston, Ill., earned a bachelor's degree in art
from the University of Arkansas and a master's in fine art in
photography and art history from the University of New Mexico.

He taught art at the University of Southwestern Louisiana in
Lafayette and at Humboldt State College in Arcata, Calif., before
serving as an assistant professor at UNM from 1969-73. He returned
to UNM in 1977 and taught there until retiring in 1996.

His titles include owner and founder of Unified Arts Co. in
Albuquerque and founder and artistic director of Unified Arts
Collaborative Print Studio, both of which were started in the 1970s.

(Lloyd Jojola - Journal Staff Write, the Albuquerque Journal, September 15, 2007)