Kenneth Victor Young (1933-2017) was an African American color field painter. Born in Louisville, Kentucky, Young moved to Washington, DC in 1964 where he associated with Howard Mehring, Thomas Downing, Alma Thomas and Sam Gilliam. He is known for experimenting with color, space and soft-edged organic forms working in acrylics on unprimed canvases and on paper. In 1973 Young was recognized as a prominent Washington Color painter with a solo exhibition at the Corcoran Gallery of Art. Young’s work has been featured in numerous group exhibitions including: Contemporary Black American Artists, Arts and Industry Building, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC (1969); Black Artists / South, Huntsville Museum of Art, Huntsville, AL (1979); African American Contemporary Art; Museo Civico D'Arte Contemporanea Di Gibellina, Palermo, Sicily (1990); Withinsight: Visual Territories of Thirty Artists; Western States Arts Federation, Santa Fe, NM (1994); African American Art: Harlem Renaissance, Civil Rights Era, and Beyond, Smithsonian American Art Museum, traveling exhibition (2015). Young’s paintings are in the permanent collections of the National Gallery of Art; Smithsonian American Art Museum, and the Katzen Art Center in Washington, DC.