Red Grooms

I Nailed Wooden Suns to Wooden Skies, 1972
Watercolor and Collage, 21 1/2" x 31"

Red Grooms was born Charles Rogers Grooms in Nashville, Tennessee, in 1937.  An innovative painter, printmaker, filmmaker, and pioneer of “happenings,” Grooms uses fantasy, wit, and satire as ways to comment on modern life in America, especially the city and its inhabitants.  He began drawing as a child, absorbing various influences that would later inform his art – Hollywood movies, the circus, and the Tennessee State Fair.  In 1955 he enrolled at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, but he quit after a semester.  The following year he moved to New York and attended the New School for Social Research, where he studied under the social realist painter Gregorio Prestopino.  He continued his formal training at the George Peabody College for Teachers in Nashville, finishing at the Hans Hofmann School of Fine Arts in Provincetown, Massachusetts, in 1957.  While working as a dishwasher in Provincetown that summer, the artist was nicknamed “Red” by a co-worker.  In September 1957 he settled in New York and began to participate in “happenings” with Allan Kaprow and others.  His early paintings were mostly figure studies and portraits painted with inexpensive hardware-store enamels and tinting colors.  In 1958 he had his first exhibition at the Sun Gallery in Provincetown, and in 1959, Grooms had a show at the City Gallery in New York.  Within a few years he was increasingly involved in making sculpture and collage.  In 1962 he created his first film, Shoot the Moon, which was followed by several others, including the well-known Ruckus Manhattan (1975-76), a “sculpto-pictorama” of New York City, and Hippodrome Hardware (1972-73).  Done as a circus-style show and based on a live performance of the same name, Hippodrome Hardware pays homage to the tools used to build his grandmother’s house and the tools of the trade employed in the Hippodrome, Manhattan’s biggest theater.  In the 1960s and early 1970s Grooms developed an exaggerated, cartoonlike style, which was heightened with the use of bright, high-keyed colors, bold compositions, and everyday subjects.  This approach was also evident in his multimedia environments, in which he filled entire rooms with cutout figures and objects.  In the late 1970s he turned his attention to diverse topics ranging from sex, football, and hardware to cowboy imagery.  Today he continues to explore themes related to popular culture, striking an edgy balance between documentation and acerbic commentary.  His work has been the subject of numerous exhibitions, including a retrospective at Rutgers University Art Gallery in New Brunswick, New Jersey, in 1973 and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia in 1985, both of which subsequently traveled around the country.  Grooms is represented in leading public collections.

 

*Excerpted from Tools as Art: the Hechinger Collection, published by Harry N. Abrams Inc.

Share this article: