Stan Kaplan

Stan Kaplan, 84, painter and poet, passed away due to the COVID-19 virus,
at St. Joseph's Hospital in Yonkers, NY on April 17, 2020. Stan was the
loving husband of the deceased Blossom Esainko, a good friend to many who
miss him dearly, and an artist and intellectual to the core. He knew the
histories of art, literature and classical music and jazz thoroughly, and a
friend could hardly mention an artist in those fields whose work he hadn't
known and explored. In the late 1960s and 1970s in NYC Stan, a painter of
hard-edge abstract works, became a member of the Art Workers Coalition
(AWC), where he worked with art critic Lucy Lippard and met Carl Andre and
Hans Haacke. In 1969 he was a founding member of the 55 Mercer Street
Gallery, which showed artists Tom Doyle, Janet Fish, Mary Miss, and Leon
Golub. Stan had 5 one-man shows at Mercer and the well-known collectors of
abstract art, Herbert and Dorothy Vogel, were very encouraging of Stan's
art, as were Robert Ryman and his wife, Meryl Wagner, who was also a member
of the Mercer Gallery.





Stan painted throughout his life and taught Art History in several colleges
and universities. In his later years he won both a Gottlieb Foundation
Artist Support Grant and a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant. He became a
poet also, and was published in many online magazines. By coincidence Stan
and his friend Phil Frey were both published in the same issue of Bindweed
magazine, though neither knew the other had submitted. When he passed away,
Stan had been working on a series of beautiful abstract drawings and
paintings based on the letters of his deceased wife Blossom's name. Stan's
close friends included Paul and Mary Fran, Phil Frey, Marty and Melissa
Friedman, Doug Taylor and Charlie Zigmund. Also he was a very loving and
influential volunteer grandfather to Marty and Melissa's sons Jake and Max
Friedman (whose own grandfathers were deceased), and a good friend to Paul
and Mary's sons Adam and Ethan Fran. His warm, smiling, encouraging and
knowledgeable presence is missed sorely and very dearly by his loved ones
and friends.