Kevin Larmee

Kevin Larmee (born 1946) is an American painter, best known for his association with the East Village art movement in New York City in the 1980s.

Early life Larmee was born in Ridgefield Park, New Jersey, and raised in a suburb of Chicago, Illinois. He attended Shimer College, then located in Mount Carroll, Illinois, from 1965 to 1967, attended the San Francisco Art Institute from 1967 to 1968, and returned to Shimer for the 1969-1970 academic year.

He and his wife, Susan Isono, moved to New York City in 1979, living in SoHo with their son, Blaise Larmee, who was born in 1985. In 1984, feeling that his work was not getting enough attention from the art world, Larmee started pasting his large painted murals outdoors, in the middle of the night, on the walls of buildings mostly near art centers around Lower Manhattan. He would check in on them frequently for maintenance against the elements, and graffiti writers.

Larmee soon began getting gallery exhibits in New York and elsewhere in the US, while continuing to create street art. Larmee had prints in the Brooklyn Museum's 24th National Print Exhibition, Public and Private: American Prints Today, that traveled to various museums around the country in 1986. His 1985 lithograph Cigarette is part of the Brooklyn Museum's permanent collection, and he also has pieces in the permanent collections of the Grand Rapids Art Museum, Indianapolis Museum of Art and Toledo Museum of Art, among others.

In 1989, Larmee and his family moved to Chicago, where he continues to paint.

Style Larmee's paintings of the 1980s were often set in nighttime urban environments, placing one or two solitary individuals on deserted streets or subway platforms, juxtaposing the minimal figures with sharp colors and layers of patterns.

Exhibitions (selected) White Columns, New York, NY, 1983 Solo exhibition, Avenue B Gallery, New York, NY, 1984 Micro Show, Now Gallery, New York, NY, 1984 ABC No Rio, New York, NY, 1984 Fashion Moda, New York, NY, 1984 Sex, Sharpe Gallery, New York, NY, 1984 New York, New Art, Vorpal Gallery, San Francisco, CA, 1985 Solo exhibition, Avenue B Gallery, New York, NY, 1985 Contemporary Visions '85, Zolla/Lieberman Gallery, Chicago, IL, 1985 East Village, Fashion Institute of Technology, New York, NY, 1986 Solo exhibition, Avenue B Gallery, New York, NY, 1986 New York: East Village Exhibit, Lancaster, OH, 1986 Solo exhibition, Giannetta Gallery, Philadelphia, PA, 1986 Eight Urban Painters, Fine Arts Center Gallery of the State University of New York at Stony Brook, 1986 Public and Private: American Prints Today, Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY; Flint Institute of Arts, Flint, MI; Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, RI; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, PA; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN; 1986–87 Solo exhibition, Signet Arts, St. Louis, MO, 1987 Solo exhibition, Natalie Bush Gallery, San Diego, CA, 1987 The Eccentric Landscape, Esther Saks Gallery, Chicago, IL, 1990 Solo exhibition, Eastwick Gallery, Chicago, IL, 1997 The Art of Democracy, Loyola University Museum of Art, Chicago, IL, 2008