Kevyn DeRuntz Lutton

1942 - 2025

Kevyn DeRuntz Lutton
03/01/1942 - 05/01/2025
Kevyn DeRuntz Lutton passed away on May 1, 2025, at her home in the Bayview neighborhood of San Francisco. She was predeceased by her wife of 42 years, Valérie Jacobs, on March 7th, 2024. Born on March 1st, 1942, in Granite City, Illinois, Kevyn was the second-to-last of nine children, growing up in a dirty steel mill town on the Mississippi River.
As soon as she completed her schooling, she made a beeline to the convent of the Adorers of the Blood of Christ, just as the Second Vatican Council called the order to return to their roots to fight for civil rights and equality. It would be a theme that would follow her for the rest of her life. After 7 years in the convent, Kevyn decided to go to school. So in the late 60's she followed her heart into the world of art.
She won a scholarship to study in England in the mid-70s and earned a teacher's certificate in both Missouri and Florida. She earned her BA and Master's in Fine Arts from Southern Illinois University and Florida State University, respectively. She worked for many years in the print shop of the San Francisco Chronicle.
Kevyn's life was enriched by her indomitable spirit, wry sense of humor, decades of artwork, and a feminist community of activists and friends. She was part of the movement to Shut Down the Livermore Labs, helped start the Reclaiming Witches Collective, worked with the Shanti Project to help gay men during the AIDs crisis and made massive paintings that document the death squads and repression in 1980s El Salvador. She & her partner supported the African-American community where she lived, including regularly working in a neighborhood garden called Girls 2000. For nearly 10 years, she spent time with two children to give a single mom a night off.
A working-class psychiatric survivor, she lived with multiple personality syndrome and other effects of trauma. She was driven to seek justice in a suffering world and she reached out to other survivors to aid their recovery.
Her art-making includes a series of evocative international faces, abstract pen and ink drawings, intricate mandalas, and large acrylic works. Her work appeared in many exhibits including "Visible for a Change" at Harvard University, "Human (Realist/Abstract)" at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, and "Other Than White" at the Community College of Southern Nevada, Las Vegas, Nevada.
Some of her collection will be preserved in the Bay Area Lesbian Archives in Oakland, CA. You can see her collection and order some of her work at LuttonJacobsArt.org
She was preceded in death by her brothers and sisters, Helen, Mary Alice, Eugene, Jack, James, Robert, Lonnie, and Barbara. She's survived by her sister-in-law Betty DeRuntz, numerous nieces and nephews, her children Catherine, David, and Michael Ferrer, her grandchild Kyle Ferrer, and her many friends in the San Francisco Bay Area.
She donated her body to the UCSF School of Medicine. In lieu of flowers, donations can be made to Lyon Martin Community Health Services.