Lost in the Funhouse
Ken Graves | June 22 – August 22, 2026
About the Artist
Ken Graves was born in Portland, Oregon 1942-2016. He received his B.F.A. in 1970 and M.F.A. in 1971 from the San Francisco Art Institute. He is the co-author of American Snapshots, 1977 and with Eva Lipman Ballroom, 1989 text by Sally Sommers. In 2014 MacBooks published a retrospective of Ken’s early work titled The Home Front. He is the recipient of a Ferguson Grant, 1973, National Endowment for the Arts, 1975 and 1986. Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, 1982, Faculty Research Fellowship, Penn State University 1980, 1991 and 1992 and The Institute of Arts and Humanistic Studies 1984, and 1989. His work has been widely exhibited and is permanent art collections at Allentown Art Museum, Brooklyn Museum, Museum of Modern Art, NY and SF Museum of Modern Art. He taught at Pennsylvania State University until 2008. He passed away in 2016. He is survived by his wife and photographic partner Eva Lipman. A collection of Ken’s collages has been published by Luhz Press and released in 2023.
Eva Lipman was born in 1946 in Czechoslovakia. She received her B.A. in literature from Hunter College and her M.S.W. 1976 from Columbia University in NY. Her photographic studies were pursued at the Center for Media Arts and the School of Visual Arts in NY. Her work has been exhibited Allentown Art Museum, PA., Blue Sky Gallery, Portland, The Museum of Modern Art, NY, NY Public Library, Clampart Gallery, NY, and SFMOMA, SF. Her photography along with her partner Ken Graves is represented by Rose Gallery in L.A., Clampart, NY and Anglim Gallery, SF. She has co-authored with Ken Graves two photography books Restraint and Desire and Derby published by TBW Books in 2022. Her work is in several private and public collections. She continues to be a steward of their work.
Lost in the Funhouse
The Gallery at Leica Store San Francisco is proud to present Lost in the Funhouse, an exhibition featuring the photography of Ken Graves.
Bringing together a selection of photographs shaped by wit, disorientation, and psychological tension, Lost in the Funhouse reflects on the instability of contemporary life and the strange theater of American culture. Borrowing its title from John Barth’s seminal 1968 collection of short stories, the exhibition emerges from a moment in American art and literature when artists and writers alike were grappling with a world that no longer felt coherent, stable, or innocent.
Graves’ photographs embrace the absurdity, humor, and contradictions embedded within everyday life. Moving through landscapes of spectacle, performance, and unease, his images reveal a world where meaning feels fragmented and uncertain. Like Barth’s protagonist Ambrose wandering anxiously through the maze of a carnival funhouse, Graves confronts a reality shaped by illusion, confusion, and emotional dislocation.
Yet rather than retreat from chaos, Graves transformed it. His photographs reveal an artist acutely attuned to the strange choreography of American life, shaping moments of tension, irony, and visual excess into compositions that are at once incisive, unsettling, and deeply human. Beneath the humor and absurdity lies a careful ordering of disorder, an artist’s ability to contain instability and transform it into something enduring.
The exhibition takes inspiration from Barth’s unforgettable metaphor of the funhouse: a place of illusion, wonder, confusion, and hidden design. In these photographs, the world itself becomes a labyrinth filled with signs, performances, false exits, and fleeting moments of recognition. What emerges is not simply documentation, but a meditation on perception, anxiety, and the role of the artist within an increasingly fractured culture.
Lost in the Funhouse celebrates Ken Graves not only as a remarkable photographer, but as an original American artist whose work continues to resonate with striking relevance today. These photographs invite viewers into a world where humor and uncertainty intertwine, and where the camera becomes both witness to and architect of the strange spectacle of modern life.
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