Professor Norman Kent

Born in 1903 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Norman Kent studied art at the Rochester Insitute of Technology and the Art Students’ League of New York. From 1926 - 1933, he pursued a career in freelance illustration in Buffalo and Rochester, and taught at Rochester’s Harley School. After a seven-month period of working abroad in Italy, Kent joined the faculty at William Smith College. Between 1935 and 1942, Kent would inspire Hobart and William Smith students to create art for publications such as the Echo and Pine yearbooks, the Speculum, and most notably, the Hobart Herald.   

Kent is well known for his woodcuts, which were featured in a number of publications and are held in the collections of over 40 major public institutions.¹ Despite depicting largely apolitical subject matter in his own work, Kent's teaching of this medium would lead James Morgan to create a series of political cartoons for the Hobart Herald.

Endnotes

1.  Roberta M. Schwartz, The Prints of Norman Kent (Geneva: Houghton House Gallery, 1987).