Edward Kerns, a former Lafayette College art professor and a founding force behind the college’s arts program, died on Monday morning. He was 80 years old.
Kerns’ death was announced in a campus-wide email from college President Nicole Hurd. The email did not cite a cause or location of death.
Before his 2022 retirement, Kerns spent more than 40 years working in Easton. He taught his craft, built the college art department almost entirely from scratch and found numerous ways to inject art directly into the blood of the city.
“Ed Kerns was a unicorn, a magical creature,” wrote biology professor Elaine Reynolds, with whom Kerns collaborated on several art projects, in an email. “I learned a great deal about a great many things from him because his mind was not limited by disciplinary boundaries.”
Kerns was a well-known and widely respected abstract artist. Throughout his career, his work was shown at hundreds of exhibitions across the globe, ranging from Ohio to Taiwan. Seven years after making the move from New York City to Easton, Kerns became Lafayette’s youngest-ever professor to hold an endowed chair.
Kerns pursued the integration of science and art in his later work. His 2018 series, “Octopus Meditations,” sought to capture the consciousness of an octopus; abstract shapes, cascades of spots and long, coiling chains of dots. The collection’s dozen paintings are now interspersed throughout the Rockwell Integrated Sciences Center.
“I think people are so used to having art conform to them,” Kerns told The Lafayette in 2003 of his “New Paintings” exhibit. “But, if art can be regarded as a complex system of modeling the world, people must bring something to it in order to gain the full experience.”
In Easton, known as an artists’ haven, Kerns was a familiar face. In the 1990s, after helping establish Lafayette’s Williams Center for the Arts, Kerns pushed for more space for the growing arts department. By 2001, Lafayette opened the doors of the Williams Visual Arts Building, the first jewel in the college’s arts campus crown and the start of its venture into the downtown Easton art scene.
“I am deeply saddened by his passing, but his legacy is everywhere on this campus,” art professor Karina Skvirksy wrote in an email. When Kerns retired, he asked Skvirksy to be his successor as department chair, a moment she called “deeply meaningful.”
“Ed believed that making art could include traditional academic research methodologies—but it could just as easily begin with something as simple as what you ate for breakfast,” she wrote. “It can be difficult to explain that art can be anything, but to his credit, he made that argument so convincingly that those of us who followed him have been able to build on that foundation.”
Kerns was also one of the chief architects of the Karl Stirner Arts Trail, which opened to the city in 2011. He served as the chair of the trail’s board of directors until 2022, earning a certificate from the mayor’s office commending his contributions to the city’s cultural landscape.
“Ed was very much dedicated to the idea that we all belong to each other in these beautiful and profound ways,” said college President Nicole Hurd, who first met Kerns in 2022. “He’s the one who taught me that when something is broken, or when something fails, it can be amended and actually come back, even more beautiful, even more strong, even more interesting. And I just think it was a gift that he gave me that wisdom.”
Those interested in viewing Kerns’ work on campus can view his “Octopus Meditations” series in the common areas of the Rockwell Integrated Sciences Center. His website, edkernsart.com, also displays a great many of his pieces.
Arrangements for a campus memorial service in Kerns’ honor are under discussion, according to college spokesman Scott Morse.
