. He was 85. He was predeceased by his first wife, Jayne, who died in 2000, and leaves their three children, John, Ainslie and Peter, as well as his second wife, the Vancouver artist and instructor Cathy Busby.“Thanks to his long-term steering of NSCAD from the mid-’60s through the ‘80s, Kennedy found himself in continual contact with many of the most cutting-edge artists, critics and historians of our time,” Kitty Scott, chief curator at the National Gallery of Canada, wrote in an e-mail.
Mr. Kennedy attended high school there, excelling at athletics as well as art, and met his future wife Jayne Whitty when they were teenagers. They married in 1959 while he was still a student at the Ontario College of Art and Design He continued his studies at the universities of Buffalo and Ohio, before he took a job leading the art department at Northland College in Ashland, Wis.
Mr. Kennedy with assistants and former students working on the Quid Pro Quo paintings in Vancouver in 2016.Happenings, performances, minimalism and conceptual art became the order of the day as well as visits with the biggest international art stars including the German painter Gerhard Richter, the American conceptual artists Lawrence Weiner and Dan Graham, the environmental artist Robert Smithson and pioneers of feminist art such as Miriam Schapiro and the critic Lucy Lippard.
At the start of a course he would say “Okay, you have all got As. Now that we have got that out of the way, let’s get down to work,” Ms. Busby said, recalling Mr. Kennedy’s signature critique for student work: “That’s really good and it could be better.” “Kennedy’s grudging acceptance of the term perhaps relates to the common misperception that conceptual art replaced material objects with disembodied ideas,” Ms. Scott said. “He remained an object-maker and someone finely attuned to the physical encounter between viewer and artwork.”In the 1980s, he began what would become a continuing series of floor-to-ceiling texts rendered in Superstar Shadow, a favourite typeface.