Background
Red Grooms was born on June 7, 1937 in Nashville, Tennessee, United States.
1975
Grooms in his studio, 1975.
111 S Michigan Ave, Chicago, IL 60603, United States
In 1955, Red Grooms attended Art Institute of Chicago.
230 Appleton Pl, Nashville, TN 37203, United States
In 1956, he enrolled at Peabody College of Education and Human Development.
72 5th Ave, New York, NY 10011, United States
In 1956, the artist briefly studied at New School for Social Research.
Provincetown, Massachusetts, United States
In 1957, Red attended a summer session at the Hans Hofmann School of Fine Arts in Provincetown, Massachusetts, where he met Yvonne Andersen, his future colleague.
633 West 155th Street, New York, NY, 10032, United States
In 2000, Grooms became a member of American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Red Grooms
Red Grooms
Red Grooms seated between passengers on his "Subway" at the May 1976 opening of "Ruckus Manhattan".
Red Grooms was born on June 7, 1937 in Nashville, Tennessee, United States.
In 1955, Red Grooms attended Art Institute of Chicago. The following year, he enrolled at Peabody College of Education and Human Development. The same year, in 1956, the artist briefly studied at New School for Social Research. In 1957, he attended a summer session at the Hans Hofmann School of Fine Arts in Provincetown, Massachusetts, where he met Yvonne Andersen, his future colleague.
Grooms began exhibiting at the Sun Gallery in Provincetown, Massachusetts, in 1958. He also performed public pieces, which came to be known as "happenings" there. As the creator of one of the first "happenings", Grooms turned away from Abstract Expressionism and forged the way for the Pop Art movement. Among his earliest public works in 1958-1959 were several "happenings", such as "Play Called Fire", "The Walking Man" and "Burning Building".
In the late 1960's, Red began constructing, what he called sculpto-pictoramas, three-dimensional constructions of intricate urban settings. His "City of Chicago" (1967), for example, depicts the city's most famous buildings and historical figures, such as Abraham Lincoln and Al Capone. Similarly, "Ruckus Manhattan" (1975) was a cartoon-like construction of the city’s subways and landmarks, and invited the viewer to step into the immersive environment.
Grooms's examination of the history of art is often clever and insightful. "Nighthawks Revisited" (1980) is a colored drawing, based on a well-known painting by Edward Hopper, a major American artist. Unlike Hopper's brooding work, Grooms's version shows Hopper in the scene, looking lonely and out-of-place in the very ordinary environment. The viewer realizes, how much Hopper reshaped the environment in his paintings, when he sees the scene through Grooms's eyes.
Grooms chronicled the American scene with insight, wit and humor. Yet, at times his vision aroused controversy. "Shoot-out" (1983), a 26-foot-long painted aluminum sculpture, showing a cowboy and an American Indian, shooting at each other, brought about intense criticism in Denver, Colorado, where it was commissioned for a public site. The sculpture was criticized for the artist's insensitivity to Indian history and its inaccurate view of the history of Indian-white settler conflict. Yet, Grooms's vision of society was generally an optimistic one, and the general public responded with enthusiasm to his work.
In 1985, Grooms's first major retrospective, showing 29 years of his work, opened at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia. The retrospective ended in Nashville, Grooms's hometown, at the Tennessee State Museum on October 26, 1986. Grooms also illustrated a children's book "Rembrandt Takes a Walk", written by M. Strand and published in 1986.
The artist also worked with a wide variety of printmaking techniques, such as woodblock printing, stencils and etchings. He produced several three-dimensional portraits, made of sculpted paper and lithographs, including one of Willem de Kooning in 1987.
Currently, the artist lives and works in New York City.
Quotations:
"I have both exploited and been exploited in the print field."
"I had always done these 3D things that you could walk through. They were always done off the seat of my pants without blueprints or course."
"I can't do the movies like I do painting because I am really more of a sort of dilettante or something. I mean I know guys that make movies that I can see it is absolutely their medium and they can just go from one movie right into the next because it is just - they have got it so much on the tips of their fingers. But for me it is a special effort."
Red married Mimi Gross in 1963. Their marriage produced one child, Saskia Grooms. In 1976, the couple divorced.