Gallery Visit: Red Grooms at Marlborough

Red Grooms did this painting of himself. Notice his red hair. Grooms (b 1937) is a multi-media artist. That means he likes to work with different materials: paint, wood, metal, plastic, and put them together. Here is his idea of a store with a stroller passing by:

Grooms is funny.  His art is about New York places and New York people. Here is his newsstand:

Here is a little street cart that sells soda. He sees something interesting in the things that we see every day. Would you do a painting of traffic? Here is Grooms's idea of traffic:

Here is Grooms's idea of Saks Fifth Avenue, a great New York department store:

He can see something wonderful in the things we see every day, like a city bus. A city bus???? He built this life-size, city bus. He sewed plastic sheets together and stretched them over a metal frame.  The bus looks real. You are surprised to see it in a room, in an art gallery. Pretty funny.

You can even step inside the bus and see his life-size wood sculptures of people sitting on the seats. It is an amazing art work. Here are his sculptures of some passengers:

This is the side of the bus, with a poster advertising the  "Bingling Brothers Circus." (Zoom in on this photo to make it larger.)

Red Grooms is a very special artist. He can be funny, but he can be serious too. After I left his exhibition and walked outside, I saw the traffic, the people, and the buses, in a new way. Everywhere I looked I saw art. Thank you Red Grooms.

An artbusnyc Zoo Project

This is how you and your child can make a multi-media construction like the constructions of Red Grooms:

Take some photos at the New York zoo.  Try to take one very wide photograph of the whole zoo. (This will be your background.) Photograph some of the cages and the animals. Photograph some of the people. Print the photographs. Paste them on heavy paper. Cut them out. Leave some extra paper at the bottom of each cutout. (You will fold this back to make a stand for your cutouts.)  Glue your "background" to a cardboard box (so it stands). Use a piece of cardboard for the ground. (Arrange your cutouts on the cardboard, and design your zoo. When you like your design, glue the cutouts to the cardboard. There. Now you have a zoo kind of like a Red Grooms construction.

The Red Grooms exhibition was at the Marlborough Gallery at 40 West 57th Street until October 22, 2011.