Knute Stiles

Last updated

Knute Stiles (1923-December 1, 2009) was a union organizer, painter, collagist, art critic, poet and entrepreneur. He was born in Minnesota, the son of the state's first female physician. He went to the St. Paul Art School, [1] and after World War II, attended Black Mountain College in North Carolina. [2]

Contents

Career

Stiles had served in Alaska in the U.S. Army during the Second World War. He returned there annually, spending summers fishing in Alaska through 1956 working salmon boats and organizing cannery workers. From 1946 to 1948, he attended Black Mountain College, near Ashville, N.C. [3] With assistance from the G.I. Bill of Rights, he graduated from the California School of Fine Arts in 1953. From the autumn of 1953 to 1960, he co-owned and co-managed, with fellow former Black Mountain student, artist Leo Krikorian, The Place, an artists' and writers' bar and gallery in North Beach. [4] The bar featured poetry readings and jazz, and hosted the debut showing of artist Jay DeFeo's work. It was known for its open mike, "Blabbermouth Nights." It was frequented in those years by members of the Beat Generation including Jack Kerouac, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Richard Brautigan, Allen Ginsberg and, from the San Francisco Renaissance, Jack Spicer. [5] [6]

Knute taught drawing at the San Francisco Art Institute and wrote art criticism for many years in Art Forum and Art in America. He was a dedicated avant-gardist, showing at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and various galleries in San Francisco and New York, and owned a gallery and frame shop in the latter. [1]

He was a member of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union in the 1960s in San Francisco, California.

He cofounded, and shepherded for decades, an intentional community in San Francisco called East-West House. Other co-founders were from the American Academy of Asian Studies, moving on because Alan Watts was leaving that school. A few years later while Joanne Kyger was living there she began training in Zen meditation with Shunryū Suzuki. Suzuki later founded the San Francisco Zen Center, where more East-West House residents trained in Zen. In addition to Asian Studies scholars and seekers like Ananda Claude Dalenberg, Gia-Fu Feng, and Dick Price, many artists and writers resided there over the years, including Kyger and her future husband Gary Snyder, Albert Saijo, Lew Welch, Tom Field, [7] Lenore Kandel and Phillip Whalen. Jack Kerouac was briefly a guest, and many residents became characters, under pseudonyms, in his novels On the Road and Big Sur . Kerouac's biographer, Gerald Nicosia, wrote that East-West House "was no placid colony of self-contained workers," but instead, "a madhouse of Zen lunatics." East-West House was first located at 2273 California Street near Japantown, then Geary Street in "the Avenues" and finally its members purchased a Victorian home at 733 Baker Street, in the Haight-Ashbury district. [8] [9]

Stiles lived for several years in San Cristobal de las Casas, Mexico. He spent his last twenty active years in Bisbee, Arizona writing poetry and painting, before moving to an assisted living residence in Tucson, Arizona. He died in Tucson on December 1, 2009. [1]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Gary Snyder</span> American poet (born 1930)

Gary Snyder is an American poet, essayist, lecturer, and environmental activist. His early poetry has been associated with the Beat Generation and the San Francisco Renaissance and he has been described as the "poet laureate of Deep Ecology". Snyder is a winner of a Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and the American Book Award. His work, in his various roles, reflects an immersion in both Buddhist spirituality and nature. He has translated literature into English from ancient Chinese and modern Japanese. For many years, Snyder was an academic at the University of California, Davis, and for a time served as a member of the California Arts Council.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Beatnik</span> Media stereotype based on characteristics of the Beat Generation

Beatniks were members of a social movement in the mid-20th century, who subscribed to an anti-materialistic lifestyle. They rejected the conformity and consumerism of mainstream American culture and expressed themselves through various forms of art, such as literature, poetry, music, and painting. They also experimented with spirituality, drugs, sexuality, and travel. The term "beatnik" was coined by San Francisco Chronicle columnist Herb Caen in 1958, as a derogatory label for the followers of the Beat Generation, a group of influential writers and artists who emerged during the era of the Silent Generation's maturing, from as early as 1946, to as late as 1963, but the subculture was at its most prevalent in the 1950s. This lifestyle of anti-consumerism may have been influenced by their generation living in extreme poverty in the Great Depression during their formative years, seeing slightly older people serve in WWII and being influenced by the rise of left-wing politics and the spread of Communism. The name was inspired by the Russian suffix "-nik", which was used to denote members of various political or social groups. The term "beat" originally was used by Jack Kerouac in 1948 to describe his social circle of friends and fellow writers, such as Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, and Neal Cassady. Kerouac said that "beat" had multiple meanings, such as "beaten down", "beatific", "beat up", and "beat out". He also associated it with the musical term "beat", which referred to the rhythmic patterns of jazz, a genre that influenced many beatniks.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Beat Generation</span> Literary movement

The Beat Generation was a literary subculture movement started by a group of authors whose work explored and influenced American culture and politics in the post-World War II era. The bulk of their work was published and popularized by Silent Generationers in the 1950s, better known as Beatniks. The central elements of Beat culture are the rejection of standard narrative values, making a spiritual quest, the exploration of American and Eastern religions, the rejection of economic materialism, explicit portrayals of the human condition, experimentation with psychedelic drugs, and sexual liberation and exploration.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Joanne Kyger</span> American poet

Joanne Kyger was an American poet. The author of over 30 books of poetry and prose, Kyger was associated with the poets of the San Francisco Renaissance, the Beat Generation, Black Mountain, and the New York School.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">San Francisco Renaissance</span> 1947-1960s cultural events related to the Beats and Hippie movements

The term San Francisco Renaissance is used as a global designation for a range of poetic activity centered on San Francisco, which brought it to prominence as a hub of the American poetry avant-garde in the 1950s. However, others felt this renaissance was a broader phenomenon and should be seen as also encompassing the visual and performing arts, philosophy, cross-cultural interests, and new social sensibilities.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Philip Whalen</span> American poet

Philip Glenn Whalen was an American poet, Zen Buddhist, and a key figure in the San Francisco Renaissance and close to the Beat generation.

<i>The Dharma Bums</i> 1958 novel by Jack Kerouac

The Dharma Bums is a 1958 novel by Beat Generation author Jack Kerouac. The basis for the novel's semi-fictional accounts are events occurring years after the events of On the Road. The main characters are the narrator Ray Smith, based on Kerouac, and Japhy Ryder, based on the poet and essayist Gary Snyder, who was instrumental in Kerouac's introduction to Buddhism in the mid-1950s.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">California Institute of Integral Studies</span> Private, non-profit university based in San Francisco

The California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS) is a private university in San Francisco, California. It was founded in 1968. As of 2020, the institute operates in two locations: the main campus near the confluence of the Civic Center, SoMa, and Mission districts, and another campus for the American College of Traditional Chinese Medicine in the Potrero Hill neighborhood. As of 2020, CIIS has a total of 1,510 students and 80 core faculty members.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Six Gallery reading</span> Poetry event

The Six Gallery reading was an important poetry event that took place on Friday, October 7, 1955, at 3119 Fillmore Street in San Francisco.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Gia-Fu Feng</span> Chinese-American translator

Gia-fu Feng was a prominent translator of classical Chinese Taoist philosophical texts, founder of an intentional community called Stillpoint, and leader of classes, workshops, and retreats in the United States and abroad based on his own unique synthesis of tai chi, Taoism, and other Asian contemplative and healing practices with the Human Potential Movement, Gestalt therapy, and encounter groups.

Carolyn Elizabeth Robinson Cassady was an American writer and associated with the Beat Generation through her marriage to Neal Cassady and her friendships with Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and other prominent Beat figures. She became a frequent character in the works of Jack Kerouac.

Donald Merriam Allen was an American editor, publisher and translator of American literature. He is best known for his project The New American Poetry 1945-1960 (1960), one of the anthologies of contemporary American writing he released.

Wally Bill Hedrick was a seminal American artist in the 1950s California counterculture, gallerist, and educator who came to prominence in the early 1960s. Hedrick's contributions to art include pioneering artworks in psychedelic light art, mechanical kinetic sculpture, junk/assemblage sculpture, Pop Art, and (California) Funk Art. Later in his life, he was a recognized forerunner in Happenings, Conceptual Art, Bad Painting, Neo-Expressionism, and image appropriation. Hedrick was also a key figure in the first important public manifestation of the Beat Generation when he helped to organize the Six Gallery Reading, and created the first artistic denunciation of American foreign policy in Vietnam. Wally Hedrick was known as an “idea artist” long before the label “conceptual art” entered the art world, and experimented with innovative use of language in art, at times resorting to puns.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Richard Denner</span> American poet

Richard Denner is an American poet associated with the Berkeley Street Poets and the Poets of the Pacific Northwest. He is the founder and operator of dPress, which has published over two hundred titles, mostly of poetry and most in chapbook format.

Leo Valledor (1936–1989) was a Filipino-American painter who pioneered the hard-edge painting style. During the 1960s he was a member of the Park Place Gallery in SoHo, New York City, which exhibited many influential and significant artists of the period. He was a leader of the minimalist movement in the 1970s.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Reb Anderson</span> American Zen teacher

Tenshin Zenki Reb Anderson is an American Buddhist who is a Zen teacher in the Sōtō Zen tradition of Shunryu Suzuki. He is a senior dharma teacher at the San Francisco Zen Center and at Green Gulch Farm Zen Center in Marin County, California, where he lives. According to author James Ishmael Ford, "Reb Anderson is one of the most prominent of contemporary Western Zen teachers."

Albert Fairchild Saijo was a Japanese-American poet associated with the Beat Generation. He and his family were imprisoned as part of the United States government's internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, during which time he wrote editorials on his experiences of internment for his high school newspaper. Saijo went on to serve in the U.S. Army and study at the University of Southern California. Later he became associated with Beat Generation figures including Jack Kerouac, with whom he wrote, traveled and became friends.

Kay Larson is an American art critic, columnist, author, and Buddhist practitioner. She wrote a column of art criticism for New York magazine for 14 years. Her writing about art and Buddhism has appeared in numerous publications, including The New York Times, ARTnews, The Village Voice, Vogue, Artforum, Tricycle, and Buddhadharma, among others.

The Zen boom was a rise in interest in Zen practices in North America, Europe, and elsewhere around the world beginning in the 1950s and continuing into the 1970s. Zen was seen as an alluring philosophical practice that acted as a tranquilizing agent against the memory of World War II, active Cold War conflicts, nuclear anxieties, and other social injustices. The surge in interest is thought to have been heavily influenced by lectures on Zen given by D.T. Suzuki at Columbia University from 1950 to 1958, as well as his many books on the subject. Authors like Ruth Fuller Sasaki and Gary Snyder also traveled to Japan to formally study Zen Buddhism. Snyder would influence fellow Beat poets from Allen Ginsberg, and Jack Kerouac, to Philip Whalen, to also follow his interest in Zen. Alan Watts also published his classic book The Way of Zen as a guide to Zen intended for western audiences.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Alan Lynch (artist)</span> American artist

Alan Lynch was an American painter associated with post-war California art.

References

  1. 1 2 3 Knute Stiles Obituary, San Francisco Chronicle , December 13, 2009. Retrieved August 7, 2018.
  2. ↑ Kino, Carol (16 March 2015). "In the Spirit of Black Mountain College, an Avant-Garde Incubator". The New York Times. ISSN   0362-4331 . Retrieved August 7, 2018.
  3. ↑ Mervin Lane, ed. (1990). Black Mountain College: Sprouted Seeds : an Anthology of Personal Accounts. pp. 222, 342. ISBN   0870496638. OCLC   21441294 . Retrieved September 11, 2019.
  4. ↑ Black Mountain Project Leo Krikorian, Retrieved August 8, 2018.
  5. ↑ The life and times of North Beach’s renowned Beat dive, the Place, San Francisco Chronicle , Gary Kamiya, March 17, 2017. Retrieved August 7, 2018.
  6. ↑ Poet Be Like God: Jack Spicer and the San Francisco Renaissance. pp. 55–56, 80.
  7. ↑ Obituaries: Tom Field, Bay Area Reporter , December 7, 1995. Retrieved August 21, 2018.
  8. ↑ The Beat Generation in San Francisco: A Literary Tour. San Francisco: City Lights Books. 2003. p. IX, 151–152. ISBN   0872864170.
  9. ↑ Wilson, Carol Ann (2009). Still Point of the Turning World: The Life of Gia-fu Feng. Amber Lotus Publishing. pp. 126–127. ISBN   978-1-60237-296-2.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.