Phyllis Kind

Phyllis Barbara Kind ( Cobin; 1933–2018) was an American art dealer active in Chicago and New York. She promoted the work of the Chicago Imagists and outsider artists.

Early life and family Phyllis Kind was born Phyllis Barbara Cobin in The Bronx, New York City on 1 April 1933 to Harold Cobin, a dentist, and Dorothy (Weintraub) Cobin. She was their only child. Her studies included chemistry at the graduate level.

She married Joshua Kind, whom she met at university, in 1956. The couple moved to New York City; Phyllis taught elementary school while Joshua pursued a PhD in Renaissance art at Columbia University.

For 25 years, Ron Jagger served as director of Phyllis Kind Gallery in New York.

Artists represented

Phyllis Kind became interested in the contemporary art scene of Chicago. She followed the work of a movement that, overall, was called the Chicago Imagists. In fact, the movement included three distinct subgroups: The Monster Roster; The Hairy Who; and the Chicago Imagists. She gave some of the artists in the movement their first solo shows: Jim Nutt and Gladys Nilsson in 1970 and Roger Brown in 1971. Christina Ramberg, Karl Wirsum, and Joseph Yoakum.

She also introduced the work of outsider artists. She was the first American gallerist to show contemporary and outsider work together. In 1972, Phyllis Kind presented her first group show of outsider art, "The Artless Artist: Contemporary 'Naive Works." Over the years, Kind showed Chicago custodian Henry Darger, Mexican artist Martín Ramírez (discovered by Nutt), and Europeans Adolf Wölfli, Augustin Lesage, Carlo Zinelli. She was an advisor to Sanford L. Smith & Associates' annual Outsider Art Fair since its inception in 1992, In her Soho gallery, Kind also showcased the work of Dan Keplinger, an artist with cerebral palsy, who was the subject of the 1999 Oscar-winning short documentary King Gimp.

Later life and death In 2009, Phyllis Kind closed her last gallery, a space in New York's Chelsea district that she had occupied since 2006.

Kind died in San Francisco, California on September 28, 2018, aged 85, from respiratory failure.