Wallace N. Kammann (1916 - 1995)

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Wallace Kammann was born in 1916 in Cody, Wyoming.  His father was a Presbyterian minister so the family frequently moved while he was growing up.  He ended up going to Coe College in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and to what is now the Minneapolis College of Art and Design in the late 1930s.  In 1939 he was one of the first students to join Laszlo Moholy-Nagy at the New Bauhaus, his progressive art school in Chicago.

 

After that Kammann returned to Minneapolis and taught drawing, design, and sculpture for the Works Projects Administration’s Minnesota Art Project schools at the Walker Art Center, the St. Paul Art Center, and the Duluth Art Center.

 

His first job as a photojournalist was at the Tribune in Minneapolis.  In the early 1950s he became a camera operator for WTCN-TV and later at WCCO-TV.  He was hired away from these Twin Cities TV stations to film wildlife movies for the Walt Disney Co. 

 

In 1962 Kammann went to work for KSTP-TV in Minneapolis as a cameraman and stayed there for 20 years.  Sports photography was his forte, and in the mid-1960s he was the official photographer for the Minnesota Twins and the Vikings.

 

After retiring from KSTP-TV in 1982, Kammann devoted most of his time to watercolor, acrylic, and oil painting.  Both his photographs and his paintings are in many private collections and he was represented in many national exhibits as well as those at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, the Walker Art Center, and private galleries in the Twin Cities.

 

His paintings were in juried shows at the Minnesota State Fair, the Minnesota Artists Association, the North Star Watercolor Society, and the Hennepin Artists Association.

 

Kammann passed away in June 1995.

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