Edward Kienholz was an American artist known for his found-object assemblages and installations he referred to as tableauxs. In one of his most controversial works, The State Hospital (1966), Kienholz provided a grisly account of the filth-laden conditions he saw while working at a mental hospital during the 1940s. “I mostly think of my work as the spoor of an animal that goes through the forest and makes a thought trail, and the viewer is the hunter who comes and follows the trail,” he once reflected. “At one point I as the trail-maker disappear. The viewer then is confronted with the dilemma of ideas and directions.” Born on October 23, 1927 in Fairfield, WA, he grew up on a wheat farm where he learned carpentry, metalwork, and mechanics. Briefly attending college, Kienholz worked various jobs as a young man before moving to Los Angeles in 1952. Finding himself amidst a small subset of artist’s in the city, he along with the curator Walter Hopps founded Ferus Gallery. The gallery facilitated friendships with several artists of the time, including Bruce Conner and Wallace Berman, whose work made a lasting impact on Kienholz’s own practice. Throughout the 1960s, the artist created a number of tableauxs that graphically criticized racism, abuse, and other social injustices in ways that certain groups of people found objectionable. Kienholz married Nancy Reddin in 1973, the two went on to produce a number of collaborative works over the following decades. He died on June 10, 1994 in Sandpoint, ID. Today, the artist’s works are held in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C., among others.