Ken Ratner

American, born 1953

(not assigned)New York City, New York, USA

BiographyBIBLIOGRAPHY AND SCHOLARLY INFORMATION
Ken Ratner was born in New York City in 1953 and lived in Texas and California before returning to the city in the mid-1990s. From an early age, he began to draw, focusing on portraits, but later street life and the urban poor would become his primary subject matter in both his drawing and photography. He took evening sketch classes at the Art Students League in New York City in the 1980s, and would regularly study artwork and photography in museums, galleries and books.

Ratner is a self-taught photographer whose principal field of interest is the urban city, particularly its derelict aspects that one often shuns, ignores, fails to notice or avoids. Yet in these out of the way places, he discovers a rich humanity in keeping with his long-time interest in the work of the Ashcan School artists from the turn of the last century. Like many of those artists (John Sloan, Jerome Myers), Ratner is similarly inspired to go onto the streets to seek out an inherent beauty in commonplace subjects. Ratner also draws inspiration from the work of photographers Berenice Abbott, Robert Adams, Lewis Hine, Walter Rosenblum, Helen Levitt, and Manuel Alvarez Bravo. His work has been exhibited frequently.
Source: https://www.askart.com/artist/Ken_Ratner/11232654/Ken_Ratner.aspx

MUSEUM COLLECTIONS
Ratner’s work is in 41 national and international museum collections: American Italian Heritage Museum; Bibliotheque Nationale de France; Butler Institute of American Art; Centro Portuguese de Fotografia (Portugal); Chinese American Museum DC; Delaware Art Museum; El Paso Museum of Art; Frederick R. Weisman Art Museum; Housatonic Museum of Art; Hungarian National Museum; Hunter Museum of American Art; La Salle University Art Museum; Lithuanian Museum of Art; Lower East Side Tenement Museum; Lyman Allyn Art Museum; Mead Art Museum; Munson-Williams-Proctor Arts Institute; Musee Juif de Belgique; Musee Photographie de la Charleroi (Belgium); Museum of Chinese in America; Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest; Museum of the Big Bend; Museum of the Southwest; National Portrait Gallery-Smithsonian Institution; New Britain Museum of American Art; New-York Historical Society; New York State Museum; Rockwell Museum; Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art; San Angelo Museum of Fine Art; The Booth Museum; The Columbus Museum of Art (Ohio); The Haifa Museum of Art; The Jule Collins Smith Museum of Fine Art; The Long Island Museum of American Art, Carriages and History; The Menello Museum of American Art; Tokyo Photographic Art Museum; Tucson Museum of Art; University Art Museum-Binghamton; University of Saint Joseph Art Museum; William Benton Museum of Art

Person TypeIndividual