ROD KAGAN A LEGEND Lives on BY Kate Elgee PHOTOGRAPHY Gail Severn Gallery
Sculptor Roderick H. “Rod” Kagan, who passed away at home in Sun Valley December 2010, has been called one of Idaho’s greatest artists. Winner of the 1984 National Endowment for the Arts, his sculptures have been displayed in art museums, public spaces and private collections throughout the country. But Idaho, thankfully for us, is where he called home for almost 40 years.
A native-born New Jersey boy, Rod grew up working at his father’s butcher shop by day and building hot rods by night. “From the time he was very young, he was building things, making things and collecting things,” said Gail Severn, owner of the Gail Severn Gallery in Ketchum—things like model airplanes, cars and trains. He had a natural eye for mechanical functionality and an obvious aptitude for engineering, but he also saw something in these grease-stained and rusting materials that most others missed—a curious beauty. “I never knew anyone so fascinated with junkyards,” said Severn. “It was part of his upbringing; learning how to see shape, how to use these materials and how to take something that was already made and repurpose it. It all informed his ability to appropriate them into his art.” When Kagan moved out West in 1973, touring the alpine ski mountains, he found a budding art scene forming in Ketchum. The Sun Valley Center for the Arts (SVCA) was only a couple years old at the time, but it created “a real sense of community in the arts that I think gave people
permission to be artists, to follow their chosen path. It was like an incubator of ideas,” said Severn, who met Kagan through one of the SVCA gatherings. It was within this “incubator,” among the other artists and big names of 1970s Ketchum, that Kagan’s sculpting career began to take shape. Two years after moving to the Valley, he hand-built an octagonal “compound” out Chocolate Gulch, which served as his home, studio workspace and gallery. In his studio, he had drill presses and welding torches, grinders and air compressors, hydraulic lifts for moving up to 900-pound structures and a metal operating table to cut designs out of bronze and steel. Here, he created well over 1,000 sculptures throughout his career. And in his backyard, he had mountains. “He was an avid outdoorsman,” said Severn. In Sun Valley, he found the mountains, rivers, skiing and hiking that originally drew him westward. “Here he had everything he needed,” she said. During his exploration of the Wood River Valley’s trails, hik-
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