Red Grooms

(b Nashville, TN, 1 June 1937).

American painter, sculptor, installation artist, draughtsman, performance artist and film maker. He studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (1955), at the New School for Social Research in New York (1956) and under Hans Hofmann in Provincetown, MA (1957). Together with Allan Kaprow, Claes Oldenburg, Jim Dine, Robert Whitman (b 1935) and others, he was briefly an instrumental figure in the history of performance art in New York during the late 1950s with the Happenings he presented as early as 1957, most famously The Burning Building (1959), which took place in his loft at 148 Delancey Street (designated the Delancey Street Museum). With their narrative flow and elements of comedy, Grooms's highly engaging performances were closer to the 'painter's theatre' of Dine than to the events created by Kaprow or the Fluxus artists. The energy that went into these performances was soon redeployed into films, beginning with Shoot the Moon (1962), a reworking of the silent film A Trip to the Moon by Georges Méliès (1861-1938), which Grooms directed with cinematographer Rudy Buckhardt and which gave ample scope for his playful sense of humour. The focus of his subject-matter on urban life and humanity, already central to his Happenings, was likewise transferred into the paintings and painted constructions using found materials, such as Policewoman (1959; New York, Mr and Mrs D. Anderson priv. col., see 1985 exh. cat., no. 21), on which his subsequent idiosyncratic art depends.

By the mid-1960s, in works such as Maine Room (Casein on wood, paper and cardboard, in plexiglass box, 1965; New York, K. and J. Powers priv. col., see 1985 exh. cat., no. 40), Grooms had already developed, albeit on a miniature scale, the concept of environmental interiors crammed with human incident and amusing detail for which he was later to become best known. Favouring a knockabout humour, a homemade look and a naive style, he set himself the challenge of making lifesized painted environments that invited the spectator to experience the pulsating dynamism and chaotic vitality of city life. One of the most ambitious of these projects, made in collaboration with his wife, Mimi Grooms, was Ruckus Manhattan (1976), a sprawling mixed media construction that paid homage to his adoptive city through such everyday scenes as Subway (2.74×5.66×11.33 m, 1976; see 1985 exh. cat., no. 65). As his deranged comic-book style became more pronounced in the late 1970s and 1980s, the arrival of a younger generation of artists including, above all, those associated with graffiti art helped recontextualize his work, however stubbornly individualistic it remained. (Source: MARCO LIVINGSTONE, "Red Grooms," The Grove Dictionary of Art Online (Oxford University Press, Accessed July 15, 2004), )