William Kent (1919 - 2012): Trust the Peeple!

ON VIEW: JANUARY 15 - MARCH 7, 2026

OPENING RECEPTION: THURSDAY, JANUARY 15, 6 - 8 PM

Ricco/Maresca is pleased to present William Kent: Trust the Peeple! in collaboration with Damon Brandt.

William Kent’s unique slate prints, carved and printed in the mid‑1960s, look as if they were made for this political moment. Born in Kansas City in 1919 and working for most of his life in and around New Haven and rural Durham, Connecticut, Kent trained first in music before teaching himself to carve and print. In a barn‑studio far from the New York market, he developed a fiercely independent practice, cutting images and text into discarded classroom blackboards and hand‑printing them onto commercial fabrics—satin, dress cotton, even bedsheets—so that every impression fuses heavy slate and everyday cloth.

Their fluorescent palettes, blunt slogans, and weaponized presidents stage a loud argument about image, power, and consent—who speaks, who is spoken for, and whose silence keeps the whole spectacle running. Set against mid‑century florals, bunting, children’s prints, and lace‑like patterns, these works twist domestic surfaces into a caustic theater of American empire, masculinity, and mass persuasion. Working at the height of Pop, Kent shared the movement’s appetite for mass‑media icons but sidestepped its cool detachment: Washington, Kennedy, Johnson, and other power brokers appear not as neutral leaders but as mascots for a militarized, profit‑driven state.

Trust the Peeple! focuses on this charged moment in the 1960s, when Kent’s populist anger and graphic invention were most tightly fused. More than fifty years later, his unique slate prints still ask uncomfortable questions: What forms of violence are we willing to decorate? When we are told to smile, to keep quiet, to do our part, whose interests are being served? Kent died in 2012, leaving behind hundreds of sculptures and thousands of prints that have slowly claimed their place in major museum collections.

Special thanks to the William Kent Art Foundation and Margaret Bodell.

Artist photograph courtesy of the William Kent Art Foundation.