Nancy Reddin Kienholz - Marriage and Collaboration

Marriage and Collaboration

Reddin met Ed Kienholz at a party in Los Angeles in 1972. At that time, Kienholz was already an established artist, being a founding member of the Ferus Gallery and a long-standing participant in the Los Angeles avant garde scene. He had full custody of two children, Jenny and Noah, from one of his four previous marriages, and would later legally adopt Reddin's daughter Christine.

Reddin and Kienholz began their creative collaborations the same year they met. Their first work together was "The Middle Islands No. 1," now in the collection of the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Humlebæk, Denmark. Ed Kienholz continued to receive sole credit for these collaborations until 1981, when he publicly announced for the first time that all works after 1972 should be retroactively credited instead to "Kienholz," in collective reference to both Ed and Nancy.

In 1973, Kienholz received a grant from DAAD to work in the Federal Republic of Germany. The couple sold their house in Los Angeles, and Reddin moved with Kienholz and their children to West Berlin. The entire family, including the children, contributed to the creation of the exhibit Kienholz created using the grant. Reddin and Kienholz would divide their time between Berlin and their home in the rural Idaho Panhandle until Kienholz's death in 1994.

During their marriage, Reddin and Kienholz worked prolifically, primarily in installation. They maintained studios in Berlin and in Hope, Idaho. Kienholz received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1976, and their work was especially critically acclaimed in Europe.

After struggling with diabetes for years, Edward Kienholz died suddenly in 1994 of a massive heart attack in Sandpoint, Idaho. He was buried in a 1940 Packard, which Reddin steered into the gravesite.