Katherine Gianaclis

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Katherine Gianaclis was a painter born in 1924 in Hollywood, California and raised in the shadows of Paramount Studios. She attended Art Center in Pasadena and Chouinard. She was the foremost muralist in Las Vegas, Nevada during the latter era of the Rat Pack, the late 1960s into the early 1970s, painting major works for The International, The Desert Inn, The Showboat, The El Morocco, The Sahara, Circus Circus, The MGM, Caesars Palace and others.

Upon Gianaclis's passing in 1999 she was rediscovered by the Las Vegas Art Museum whose curator, Dr. James Mann, proclaimed her 1960s canvases predating even her mural work "at the highest cultural level" while working in a style with few precedents roughly twenty years prior to the style's popular arrival

Dr. Mann wrote at the time: "The first quality, or characteristic, is an original combination of imagery, from a disparate range of cultural sources, being employed within one painting. In Gianaclis’s case, this means imagery taken from the tradition of European art history; from the art of other major world cultures past and present; and from more popular levels of art and life within the artist’s surrounding cultural environment. The second quality derives somewhat from the first: a deliberate variety of incongruent styles being employed within the bounds of a single work. The third quality is a non-unified picture plane. That is, various images and scenes in a single painting are montaged, so to speak, or overlaid: they are represented together, whether juxtaposed or superimposed one over another. The resulting work of art contains objectified subject matter which in mundane reality could not occupy the same three-dimensional, early space or place."

Some of Gianaclis's most important paintings were painted in 1965 while Gianaclis cared for her three children with her husband Sol Kantor. All of the children were under the age of six at the time. The youngest being one year old. Some of these works include Marilyn's Smile, Voyeur, What to Suffer the World As It Is and Rake's Cold Heart.

Gianaclis's paintings of the 1960s were highly feminist in nature, often depicting darker corners of the female psyche.

Gianaclis had a spiritual upheaval in 1973 and became a "born again" Christian. She opened a Christian bookstore called Alpha Omega and helped support a local church with the effort. She painted hundreds of colorful crosses at this time which she presented on wood.

Effigy - 1960s.Another illustration of a feminine psychological state during the mid-1960s

Gianaclis was a thirty-year survivor of breast cancer when the disease returned in 1995. This circumstance drew her back to her paints and she produced just over 150 new oil paintings which took the colorful hues of her Las Vegas murals much further. She had become a fauvist and orphist, using color and form to depict beautiful scenes, some abstract and some figurative. She painted many beautiful women in this time. Her final angel series, all fully outlined with magic marker, was never begun as she passed on March 7, 1999.

Ring of Fire - 1960s.Inner feminine states symbolically represented through brutality and methods of control.

Vegas Nights - 1960s. Symbolic representation of a Las Vegas night on the town.

Woman of the Rainbow (posthumously titled) - 1998 - Gianaclis was reborn as an artist into color.

The Katherine Gianaclis Park for the Arts was founded in 2002 and operated until 2010 on the property where Gianaclis had her Bible and bookstore. There are plans to re-open the park which was named in honor of the artist.

Katherine Gianaclis

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