Kohn left for a year in Mexico in 1943. While there he worked at the Taller de Grafica Popular with artists Pablo O’Higgins, Alfredo Zalce and Leopoldo Mendez. Kohn returned to Chicago in 1945 and was teaching at the Art Institute of Chicago when he met visiting artist Stanley William Hayter, who had re-established Atelier 17 in New York. In 1949, he began a twenty-two-year career teaching printmaking at the Institute of Design. In 1950 the Kohn’s traveled to Europe, visiting printshops that Hayter introduced them to.
In 1961, he was invited to work at June Wayne’s Tamarind Lithographic Workshop in Los Angeles and, in 1971, after quitting his post in Chicago in protest of the forced resignation of a colleague he accepted the position of Professor at California State Hayward in Hayward, California and relocated to Castro Valley. Kohn’s work was honored with countless awards and is represented in the collections of the Akron Art Institute, Art Institute of Chicago, Brooklyn Museum, Fogg Art Museum, Library of Congress, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art, New York Public Library, and the Bibliothèque Nationale de France and Musée National d’Art Moderne, Paris.
Bio credits: The Annex Galleries