Kurt Wenner

Kurt Wenner is an artist best known for his development of 3-D pavement art. Wenner was inspired by anamorphic perspective, but had to invent an entirely new geometry in order to create 3-D pavement art images.

Kurt Wenner was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan on April 17, 1958, but grew up in Santa Barbara, California. Kurt Wenner produced his first commissioned mural at the age of 16 and, within a year, he was earning his living as a graphic artist. He attended both Rhode Island School of Design and Art Center College of Design.

Wenner worked for NASA as an advanced scientific illustrator, creating conceptual paintings of future space projects and extraterrestrial landscapes. In 1982 he left NASA, sold all of his belongings, and moved to Italy.

In the mid-1980s, Wenner first introduced 3-D pavement art at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art. Shortly after that, he founded the first street painting festival in the United States at the Old Mission in Santa Barbara, California. The Old Mission festival, also known as I Madonnari, continues to this day as do many of the festivals and events Wenner started throughout the country.

One often-overlooked fact of Wenner's career is that he dedicated one month every year, for ten years, to teach more than 100,000 students from elementary through university level, how to work with chalks and pastels. For his dedication, he was awarded the Kennedy Center Medallion for his outstanding contribution to arts education.

With the increasing popularity of Wenner's images, hundreds of artists around the globe became inspired to create their own versions of three-dimensional pavement art. Artists such as Julian Beever, Manfred Stader, and Edgar Müller, as well as others can trace their roots back to his innovation in the early 1980s.

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