Red Grooms

Summary of Red Grooms

Red Grooms is celebrated for the playful manner with which he breached the divide between fine art and populism. Grooms's inimitable style brought an expressive and colorful energy to a disparate range of mediums including sculpture, performance, painting, and filmmaking. Grooms remains perhaps best known as a pioneer of interactive Installation Art, with his ingenious and witty "sculpto-pictoramas" tapping into what the artist called "the neurosis of the [American] population". Although he has been a fixture on the New York art scene for six decades - and given that he has never lost sight of his Tennessee roots, nor his childhood love of state fairs, and travelling circuses - Grooms's incongruous commentaries on the mores of modern living has seen him ranked alongside European greats such as William Hogarth, Honoré Daumier, and Marcel Duchamp.

Accomplishments

• Grooms's "sculpto-pictoramas" were without precedent in terms of their cartoonish stylization, and their sheer ambition. He fully sealed his reputation in the mid 1970s with Ruckus Manhattan, a full-scale multimedia diorama that invited audiences to wonder at his take on the city's most iconic landmarks, and to mingle with wooden shoppers, tourists, sex workers, thieves and gamblers on its streets.
• Having arrived in New York (from Tennessee) in the late 1950s, Grooms teamed up with the likes of Allan Kaprow, Claes Oldenburg, and Jim Dine to stage a series of happenings. Grooms can take personal credit for introducing a more boisterous and carnivalesque mood to these thought-provoking live events.
• Although he became a bone-fide member the New York art scene, Grooms was proud of his Tennessee roots. The theme of state fares, parades, and music events pepper his oeuvre. For instance, in the late 1990s he created Carousel of Time for Nashville's Riverfront Park. Grooms replaced the traditional prancing horses with caricatures of some of Tennessee most famous luminaries, including President Andrew Jackson, the Everly Brothers, and Chet Atkins.
• Grooms used his art to pay homage to many of those who had inspired him, such as, Salvador Dalí, Lyonel Feininger, Édouard Manet, Henri Matisse, and Edward Hopper. He also produced many individual and group portraits of the Abstract Expressionist fraternity. However, Grooms went to lengths to emphasize the contributions of the ostensibly "unseen" female members of that pioneering movement, notably, Lee Krasner, Grace Hartigan, Helen Frankenthaler, Joan Mitchell, and Elaine de Kooning.

The Life of Red Grooms

Art critic Meghan E. Gattignolo writes, "Red Grooms is one of those artists you'll never get out of your head once you've experienced his work. Just as quirky as his name, Red's graphic pop art prints, 3-D lithographs, statues and mixed media images are bizarre, funny and wild".

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Important Art by Red Grooms

Artwork Images

1967

City of Chicago

After many years focusing on performative "Happenings", Grooms began developing a new medium which he called "sculpto-pictoramas". His full-scale dioramas (usually miniature, three-dimensional depiction of a scene that are often used in museums to recreate historical events, natural scenes, or to visualise fictional settings) are colorful, cartoonish, multimedia works, that combined sculpted and painted elements (and sometimes audio) to form street scenes that the viewer can physically walk through. One of the earliest of these was his City of Chicago. It measures twenty-five square feet and features a boat appearing to speed down the Chicago river, between rows of buildings and skyscrapers. Art critic Judd Tully referred to City of Chicago as a "concoction of sculpture, painting, architecture, music, and film that flooded and at same time titillated the art-seeking public". Tully adds that "Reams of preparatory sketches from walking tours, rooftop observatories, photographs, and souvenir-style picture postcards insured the accuracy of the pun-soaked details".

This piece, made in collaboration with his then wife, Mimi Gross, and a team of assistants they called the "Ruckus Construction Company", debuted at the Frumkin Gallery in Chicago in January 1968. In keeping with some of Grooms's other multi-media works, The City of Chicago also doubled as a set for the short musical film, Tappy Toes, which was produced with Gross and the Chicago based Imagist artist, Ed Flood, and featured a number of local performing artists. Following the Frumkin exhibition, City of Chicago travelled to the 1968 Venice Biennale before touring the United States (today it is part of the permanent collection of the Art Institute of Chicago. City of Chicago demonstrates the influence of both Pop Art and Abstract Expressionism on Grooms and Gross, though this, and subsequent sculpto-pictoramas are without precedents in terms of their ambitious scale, cartoonish styling, and their skewed perspective. As curator Dan Nadel put it: "there's nothing else like them".

Plywood and beaverboard, acrylic paint, motors, and speakers, with audio - Art Institute of Chicago

Artwork Images

1975

Ruckus Manhattan

Grooms and Gross's most famous sculpto-pictorama is Ruckus Manhattan, an installation of over 10,000 square feet presenting the area from New York's Battery Park to Times Square. The work was completed over a thirteen-month period with the help of twenty-one assistants and featured landmarks include the World Trade Center, Central Park, a fifteen-foot-tall Statue of Liberty, the Chrysler Building, the Stock Exchange floor, and Trinity Church. Arts editor M. H. Miller writes, "the rendering of the city in papier-mâché, vinyl and fiberglass spoke to the precariousness of urban life, the impermanent character of the city at any given moment. Intended as a celebration of the city, it has since become a reminder of a time when crime rates were up and the local government was teetering on the edge of bankruptcy".

Grooms has explained that this work was not so much about New York City as urban life in general: "I'm not that much involved in the personality of this place [New York] as something outside of me. Although now almost as a joke I can see it better. As a foreigner, it takes years, a lifetime even to understand New York, it seems". Art critic John Yau called Ruckus Manhattan "a sprawling installation where everyone saw some aspect of themselves. It was raw, democratic, expansive, polyphonic, and, above all, funny. With its broad cast of everyday comic characters, it seemed as if everyone got to make an appearance, from subway straphangers to the local pimp".

A film, also titled Ruckus Manhattan, was made during the work's creation. It features an energetic soundtrack of diverse sources - from rock music to Rossini - and poetry readings by Mimi Grooms (née Gross).

Mixed media

Artwork Images

1984

Chance Encounter at 3 A.M.

Throughout his career Grooms has paid homage to many of the most important figures in Western art history, including Rembrandt, Auguste Rodin, Thomas Eakins, Benjamin West, Henri Matisse, Salvador Dali, Edward Hopper and the key players (male and female) within the legendary New York School. In this painting, Grooms depicts a scene, as he imagined it, of the initial meeting between Willem de Kooning (right) and Mark Rothko (left).

The idea for the painting came to Grooms after reading a 1983 article in the New York Times that described how the two giants of the New York School met one early morning. Although both men had studios in the area, and were familiar with each other's work, they had never met face to face and just happened to sit on the same bench in Manhattan's Washington Square Park. Although the meeting actually occurred in the 1930s, Grooms thought it had been in the 1950s, which accounts for the inclusion of details like 1950s-style cars, and newspaper headlines about the Korean War and President Eisenhower. The painting also features an angel-like spirit, wearing a green dress, and holding a paintbrush and palette. She hovers above the two men, with their paint spattered clothing suggesting, perhaps, that she has bestowed on them divine artistic inspiration.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art notes that "Grooms imagines Rothko and de Kooning eyeing each other furtively, moments before introducing themselves. A less-than-ethereal muse, elegantly clothed in a green cocktail dress and pearls, hovers overhead holding an artist's palette and brushes. As in many of his works, Grooms dramatically condensed the space, moving the statue of the Italian hero of independence Garibaldi closer to the pair than it would be in reality. By including Garibaldi and the words of George Washington on the arch, Grooms may be drawing an analogy between historical leaders who fought for political independence and the two leaders of the then-avant-garde Abstract Expressionist movement who were pursuing a new artistic path".

Oil on canvas - Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Artwork Images

2002

The Shield

Grooms, who had witnessed the attacks on the Twin Towers first hand from his apartment window, was invited to contribute to a traveling exhibition of works on paper entitled, True Colors: Meditations on the American Spirit. The exhibition featured works by 62 American artists including: John Alexander, Herb Alpert, Will Barnet, Bruce Davidson, Richard Estes, Everett Raymond Kinstler, Roy Lichtenstein, Sally Mann, Robert Rauschenberg, and Jamie Wyeth. The exhibition sought, in the words of its organizers, the Meridian International Center (a nonpartisan organization based in Washington DC and dedicated to promoting US diplomacy), to "re-dedicate itself to its mission of promoting international understanding by facilitating this exhibition to help put these events into perspective".

Based on his paper drawing, Grooms conceived of one of his customary "crowd-scenes" within the symbolic form of a police badge or "shield". His bas-relief, made from enamel on epoxy coated Styrofoam, uses bold colors and a collection of cartoonish characters. Intended to "honor those dedicated to keeping society going", Grooms adopts a playful Pop Art mood to what was a scene of utter devastation. The Badge features the still-upright North Tower steel girders and rubble, and an assembly of emergency workers and officials, uniformed responders, firefighters, law enforcement officers, National Guardsmen, heavy equipment operators, and helmeted structural engineers. The Shield also directly references Tom Franklin's iconic image of three New York City firefighters raising the American flag (Raising the Flag at Ground Zero) although here, this hugely symbolic act of national unity and defiance, is performed by a crew of "hardhats".

The 911 Memorial Museum says of the work, "Contrary to the predicted impact of 9/11, New Yorkers had not allowed dread to incapacitate their civic life. Cautiously, they repossessed their freedoms, returning to the streets, shops, and subways. They also reclaimed their shared patriotism, sometimes masked by the New York's diversity, internationalism, and nonchalance. [...] The Shield reminds us of what hope looked like in the hard wake of the September 11 terror attacks. This was Grooms' tribute to humanity's unstoppable spirit and collaborative wiring".

Bas-relief: enamel on epoxy treated Styrofoam - 911 Memorial Museum, New York

Artwork Images

2016

Lincoln on the Hudson

Grooms, who has been fascinated by the American Civil War since the 1990s, created Lincoln on the Hudson, a "walk-through" sculpto-pictorama, to represent President Lincoln's journey by train from the Midwest to the east coast to his 1861 inauguration. As Lincoln leans out of a train window, with an oversized top hat appearing to teeter on his head, a crowd of onlookers waves and cheers. The scene also contains soldiers on horseback (the Civil War was about to begin), a drummer boy, and a brass band, as well as African-American Abolitionist Frederick Douglass, John C. Calhoun, defender of slavery, Union Major General Custer, and Confederate General Robert E. Lee. Curator Laura Vookles states "I think because there's no picture of the event, he wants you to sense the excitement of the fact that Lincoln was stopping there. You become part of the artwork from the moment you stand there".

The work, made of foam core, canvas, and colorful paint, was created in situ in the Hudson River Museum's 775 square-foot gallery space. Says Grooms, "as soon as I heard the story of Lincoln's train stopping in Peekskill, the idea for Lincoln on the Hudson hit me in a flash. I saw the whole thing in the Museum's 30-foot-tall main gallery". Lincoln reportedly said to the crowd at Peekskill "in regard to the difficulties that lie before me and our beloved country, that if I can only be as generously and unanimously sustained as the demonstrations I have witnessed indicate I shall be, I shall not fail; but without your sustaining hands I am sure that neither I nor any other man can hope to surmount these difficulties. I trust in the course I shall pursue I shall be sustained not only by the party that elected me, but by the patriotic people of the whole country". Says Vookles, "Even though the tone of what [Lincoln] said was somber, the kind of art that [Grooms] produces is more of the sense of the fanfare of actually having the president stop in your town".

Mixed Media - Hudson River Museum, Yonkers, New York

Artwork Images

2020

Irascibles II

This monotype comes from a series of twenty-six works (individual and group portraits), titled Ninth Street Women Meet the Irascibles (2019-23), in which Grooms depicted members of two influential groups of artists active in New York City in the 1940s and 1950s. The "Ninth Street Women" refers to the five Abstract Expressionist women artists who participated in the legendary 9th St. Show in New York in 1951 (the exhibition that formally debuted Abstract Expressionism). The women were Lee Krasner, Grace Hartigan, Helen Frankenthaler, Joan Mitchell, and Elaine de Kooning (they are also known as the "Sparkling Amazons", a term coined by art editor and curator Thomas Hess). Meanwhile, "The Irascibles" (or "The Irascible Eighteen") were a group of artists (including Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, Clyfford Still, Ad Reinhardt, Robert Motherwell, Hedda Sterne, and Louise Bourgeois) who, in 1950, wrote an open letter to the president of the Metropolitan Museum of Art protesting the museum's exhibition policy and demanding the formation of a department dedicated to modern American art.

A famous photograph of the Irascibles was published in Life magazine on January 15, 1951. This, and other images of the artists who helped to shape the face of modern art in New York, inspired Grooms's series. In Irascibles II, Grooms recreates the Life magazine photograph, using the same general composition and positioning of the artists, but with the addition the five Ninth Street Women in the foreground, thus offering greater recognition of the female artists (in the original photograph, only one woman, Hedda Sterne, features). Moreover, Grooms made the choice to present the women smiling, with the three at the base of the group, Frankenthaler, Mitchell, and Hartigan, shown with their arms around each other. In contrast to the unsmiling male figures, the jovial aspect introduced by the women offers the suggestion that they were, in fact, the "glue" that held the group together.

Maurice Sanchez, founder of Derriere L'Etoile Studios where Grooms produced the monotypes for this series, has stated that "Grooms in a print studio is like a three-year-old child in a toy store, he's immediately excited and gets his hands on everything he can. However, he is anything but naïve. He has a vast amount of wisdom and a wealth of experience. Watching him work with this subject matter was particularly interesting because he was adjacent to it, the fact that he was an adoring fan but also a fixture in the scene. He is living history".

Monotype - Marlborough Gallery, New York

Biography of Red Grooms

Childhood

Charles Rogers Grooms - better known to the art world as Red Grooms - was the eldest of three boys born to fundamentalist Baptist parents Gerald and Wilhelmina Grooms. He grew up in the suburbs of Nashville, Tennessee where his father worked as an engineer. Gerald Grooms had strong artistic inclinations, crafting copper bowls and ashtrays which he sold at local crafts fairs. Both parents encouraged their children's creativity, enrolling Red in art classes at the Nashville Children's Museum when he was still just ten years old. Father and son also took painting classes with Juanita Green Williams, an artist who had worked with Robert Brackman at the New York's Art Students League. Williams took father and son on weekend trips to the Vanderbilt University campus, and to the shores of the Cumberland River where they learned to draw en plein air. Red also took Saturday classes for two years with local Cubist painter and satirical cartoonist, Joseph Van Sickle.

The so-called "Music City" made a lasting impact on Grooms. He recalled, "I saw Nashville as an urban place, 'the Athens of the South,' and that always made me happy [...] I thought the country was anticultural, and Nashville a metropolis. I had lots of civic pride". Grooms has cited a range of other influences from this period too. He especially loved amusement arcades and comics, and the newspaper "funny pages" featuring characters such as Smokey Stover (his favorite), Little Orphan Annie, and "Jiggs" in Bringing Up Father.

Grooms also harbored a love of the Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey circus. Curator and arts writer Judith E. Stein explains that "The theatrical aspect of the circus greatly appealed to [Grooms], and he put on his own versions of circuses in his backyard. In eighth grade, the large tabletop model of a carnival Red made for a boy's hobby fair was awarded first prize in its category in a show at the Women's Building on the Tennessee State Fairgrounds. The 'class artist' in grammar school, Red was often chosen to do work on the blackboards for the holidays and special occasions". In high school, he also put on skits with other students, and upon graduation, was voted "wittiest" student by his peers.

Grooms's keen interest in art history was nurtured, meanwhile, by his high school art teacher, Helene Connell. He visited many touring exhibitions and became especially enamored with the works of Pablo Picasso, George Grosz, Ben Shahn, Jackson Pollock, and Joseph Stella. Grooms also played football in high school and later compared some of his performances to playing football. He explained, "I really liked back lot games, where if you had the ball, you got to be the quarterback. You make the plays on the spur of the moment, and that's exactly the way I did the happenings. It was very simple, and the key too was that they lasted less than 10 minutes".

At high school Grooms aspired to work as a set designer for the movies, and to that end enrolled in the Famous Artist School correspondence course (founded in 1948 by Albert Dorne and Norman Rockwell). Grooms later recalled, "In Nashville back then, there was nothing like a painter. You were either a teacher or a commercial artist. I wanted to be rich, so at first, I wanted to be a commercial artist". In the summers of 1953 and 1954, Grooms worked at the Lyzon Gallery in Nashville. The gallery's owner, Myron King, even purchased some of Grooms's own paintings and hung them alongside pieces by established artists like Chaim Gross, Moses Soyer, and David Burliuk.

Education and Early Training

In 1955, Grooms moved from high school to the Art Institute of Chicago (AIC). However, he spent less time in class, and more time visiting museums and galleries, where he studied the works of Bernard Buffet, Jean Dubuffet, and Francis Bacon. By his own admission he was a restless and undisciplined student who wanted "action not education". Indeed, Grooms had dropped out of AIC before the end of his first semester. He attended a teacher training course at Nashville's Peabody Institute, and art classes at the New School of Social Research in New York, and Hans Hofmann's summer school in Provincetown, Massachusetts. It was at Hoffman's school that the poet Dominic Falcone (they had become friends while working as dishwashers at a local diner), gave him the nickname "Red", on account of his flame ginger hair. Around this time he also met experimental animation pioneer Yvonne Anderson, with whom he would collaborate on a number of short films. However, Grooms soon gave up on a formal academic route of study altogether.

Grooms moved to New York's Chelsea neighborhood in 1957. He soon found opportunities to exhibit his work and was quick to find success. He befriended artists Lester Johnson, Jay Milder, Allan Kaprow, Claes Oldenburg, and Jim Dine and collaborated with them on several early projects. These included large-scale outdoor "Happenings" (a term coined by Kaprow) that combined elements of painting, poetry, music, and performance. The most successful of these was, The Burning Building. Staged several times at Grooms's studio at 148 Delancey Street, between December 4 and 11, 1959, it featured Grooms and a number of other performers wearing white clown makeup. Arts writer Abigail Cain writes, "[The Burning Building] was a great success with the audience [and] led to the first group show for Happenings, 'An Evening of Happenings', in January 1960, organized by Kaprow". Oldenburg (cited by art critic Barry Schwabsky) said of these events: "from the start there were two types of Happenings: a more emotive or expressive sort exemplified by Grooms, and a more intellectual variety coming from Kaprow. [...] The events come across as visually dense, scruffy, sometimes claustrophobic, often comical even when eerie. I'd call them polyphonic-perverse. Kaprow's pieces end up looking as rambunctious as Grooms's, and Grooms's as rhetorically stylized as Kaprow's".

Grooms and his friends gravitated towards co-operative exhibition spaces such as New York's Phoenix and Hansa Galleries. However, he and Milder began rejecting exhibition opportunities at the Phoenix (after it refused to show work by Oldenburg) and opened their own space, the City Gallery, in Grooms's second-floor loft on West 24th Street in the city's Flatiron district. Grooms recalled, "We were just kids in our twenties [...] and had a flair for attracting people to our openings". The City Gallery, which ran for just six months, but in that time hosted work by Stephen Durkee, Mimi Gross (daughter of sculptor Chaim Gross), Bob Thompson, Lester Johnson, and Alex Katz.

Although he was beguiled by the art of the New York School, Grooms was never able to fully reconcile Abstract Expressionism and his own approach to painting. He rued at the time, "I idolize abstraction. But I just can't do it. I'm locked into figuration". Artist and curator Franklin Hill has observed that, "Grooms's subjects link him to the Social Realist tradition in the witty and irreverent mode of a Reginald Marsh. But in his way of making a painting, or a sculpture, he deals with color, line, and space like an Abstract Expressionist. Every element of the design is carried out to the edge, foreground and background all bound together into a unit that doesn't elevate or demote either. This is representational painting to be sure, yet figure-ground are fused, and like Pollock's drips, effects are equable everywhere in the canvas as lines and colors command attention right up to the canvas edge".

Mature Period

In the summer of 1961 Grooms, Mimi Gross and three friends, toured Italy. They travelled from Florence to Venice in a horse-drawn carriage (painted and decorated by Gross) that stopped at villages to stage their impromptu shadow puppet show. The project, titled, Il Piccolo Circo d'Ombre di Firenze (The Little Circus of Shadows of Florence), provided the raw material for scores of paintings and drawings. In 1964, Grooms spent the summer in Maine, sharing a home with Gross, Katz, filmmaker and photographer Rudy Burckhardt, painter and printmaker Yvonne Jacquette, and the poet, Edwin Denby. They spent the summer working collaboratively on art and film projects. Grooms and Gross were married in the same year (they are parents to one daughter, Saskia).

In 1967 Grooms and Gross formed their own production company, Ruckus Construction Co. The company completed its first major work, an ambitious 25 foot square immersive installation, the following year. City of Chicago announced Grooms's "sculpto-pictoramas" series. It opened at the city's Frumkin Gallery in January 1968, before touring the country, and featuring in the Venice Biennale of the same year. Ruckus Manhattan, to this day Grooms's most famous sculpto-pictorama, followed in 1975. Constructed from and assortment of media including glued cardboard, welded steel, painted plaster, fabric, and improvised mechanical devices, it was first exhibited on 88 Pine St. (a commercial building in New York's financial district), across two pedestrian plazas, and two access ways to the Second Avenue Subway. Ruckus Manhattan was rich in exaggerated and colorful comic-book styling and architectural detail (like City of Chicago), while Grooms paid homage to Picasso by bisecting mass to create multiple views of the same object. While these installations are regarded as signature Grooms works, the art critic John Yau believes that Gross deserved to get equal billing on these projects. The couple divorced in 1976 and, according to Yau, "Gross ostensibly disappeared for more than a decade [thereafter]".

Moving away from his "city-within-a-city" sculpto-pictoramas, Grooms unveiled The Bookstore at the Hudson River Museum in 1979. It was Grooms's tribute to the joy of books, "an unexpected yet thrilling mash-up of the stately Pierpont Morgan Library and the eclectic Mendoza Book Company" according to the museum's publicity. Its curator, Jan S. Ramirez, commented, "my impulses to protect and preserve [The Bookstore] were undermined by the daily contact of visitors browsing merchandise within Grooms' kaleidoscope of sensory vinyl surfaces and faux bibliophile patrons. It was hard to police 'no touching.' But it was harder not to surrender to the ensemble drama and tactile magic of Grooms' installation". In the same year Grooms took up a guest teaching spot at the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque. While there he started working in bronze for the first time, using the lost-wax casting method (an ancient technique for creating objects in bronze, gold, silver and brass, by creating an original model or pattern in wax).

Grooms caused controversy in 1982 when his cartoon sculpture The Shoot-Out - depicting a "face-off" between a cowboy and a Plains Indian - was relocated from a traffic island in Denver to the rooftop pavilion of the Denver Art Museum. The aluminum sculpture had drawn a series of protests from Native Americans, and counter-protests by Grooms's supporters. A despondent Grooms commented, "Denver is beginning to rival Grumpsville, Tennessee, as one of the great sourpuss towns". In 1986, Grooms produced the first of his Cedar Bar works. Some 27 feet long, Grooms's pencil, crayon and watercolor tableau shows members of the New York School drinking, cavorting and fighting, in their favored drinking den (the legendary Cedar Tavern) during the late 1940s and 1950s. Also in 1986, Grooms was the subject of the award-winning short biographical film, Red Grooms: Sunflower in a Hothouse. The following year he moved into his new apartment in the iconic American Thread Building in the Tribeca neighborhood of lower Manhattan.

Between the late 1980s and the mid 1990s Grooms devoted himself to a series of prints and three-dimensional works collected under the title, New York Stories. Commenting on the series, art critic Jenifer P. Borum wrote, "In The Plaza, 1995, the famous hotel appears to be sucked violently into the sky, while a friendly horse pokes his head into our space, as if to invite us for a ride through Central Park. [...] Especially good is the Flatiron Building, 1995, in which a bird's-eye view engenders an uncomfortable sense of vertigo, despite the presence of happy-go-lucky city dwellers below". While Grooms considered himself a fully adopted New Yorker, he never lost sight of his roots and returned to Tennessee in 1998 to create 36 caricatures of figures for the Tennessee Foxtrot Carousel (1998). Grooms replaced the usual carousel horses with famous Tennesseans including President Andrew Jackson, the Everly Brothers and Chet Atkins. (Placed in Nashville's Riverfront Park, the Carousel of Time "turned" for five years before being placed in storage.)

Grooms's apartment (in Tribeca) was a mile from the World Trade Center. With a clear window view of the Twin Towers, Grooms was a first-hand witness to the September 11 attack. Ramirez writes, "When a second hijacked plane hit into the South Tower, he and his wife [sheltered] in his lower-rise studio space while fearing more attacks, public pandemonium, and the prospect of their hometown becoming immobilized by the decree of martial law. The couple spent the day in high anxiety, hearing and seeing components of the disaster that were ever more inconceivable". Grooms later explained (for a 2015 oral history project) that he felt "too overwhelmed" and "numbed" to work for months. He did, however, contribute to a traveling exhibition of works on paper, titled True Colors: Meditations on the American Spirit (2002) for which he drew a crowd-scene within the symbolic form of a police badge. He would use the drawing as the template for, The Shield, a large bas-relief made from enamel and epoxy resin on Styrofoam (and which today hangs on the wall of the 911 Memorial Museum). The following year Grooms accepted a Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Academy of Design.

Between 2006 and 2007, Grooms worked on his reinterpretation of the Metropolitan Museum's medieval Unicorn Tapestries. Commenting on Hay Days (2006); Death and Glory of the Unicorn (2006); The Unicorn Strikes Back (2006); and Romancing the Unicorn (2007), art critic Jonathan Gilmore wrote, "These magnificent paintings, which are so vividly brushed and so jam-packed with figures, animals, foliage and pattern they rival the actual tapestries in texture and decorative richness". In 2013 the paintings went on display at New York's Four Seasons Restaurant, the intended location for Mark Rothko's infamous (cancelled) Seagram Murals commission. (The Restaurantwas created by legendary architects Mies van der Rohe and Philip Johnson and was located within the landmark Seagram Building.)

In 2020 Grooms revisited his Cedar Bar series with a new monotype (a style of printmaking made by drawing and painting on a smooth, non-absorbent surface) entitled, Cedar Bar VI. He also went to lengths to celebrate the achievements of some of the female greats of American art through self-titled monotype portraits: Grace Hartigan (2020); Hedda Sterne (2020); Elaine de Kooning (2020); and Alma Thomas (2020).

In 2024 Eli Motycka, writing for the newspaper, Nashville Scene, announced that Grooms was preparing for what she called an "orderly retreat" from New York to Middle Tennessee with his exhibition, It's all About Flowers, at the David Lusk Gallery in Wedgewood-Houston. Commenting of works such as Sunrise (2020), and Limelights and Zinnias (2021), Motycka wrote, the works were a chance for Grooms "to place his fully matured hand among the great painters through history. In several works, a colorful flowering foreground gives way to deep, lush greens and browns of Grooms' screened-in Beersheba porch, where he passed the months during COVID. Practical considerations provide the best explanation for the still-life binge: lots of time, simple media, accessible subjects and a possible desire by Grooms to simplify composition as a way of distilling his own artistic identity". One year on, the 88-year-old Grooms continues to work out of his Tribeca studio.

The Legacy of Red Grooms

Grooms has won widespread acclaim for work in a variety of media. He was a key participant in the birth of "Happenings", and the creator of "sculpto-pictoramas", large-scale walk-through installations that can be more accurately understood as environments in which the viewer becomes immersed in a cartoonish world born of the its creator's restless imagination. And yet these bright and playful installations are thematically underscored by many realities of contemporary urban life, politics, and cultural obsessions. Washington's National Portrait Gallery states that "Grooms is to American art as Mark Twain is to American writing; he is the foremost humorist in his discipline". This description would account for the views of writers such as Judith Stein who have likened Grooms to legendary artists and satirists, William Hogarth and Honoré Daumier.

Considered something of a "one man movement", Grooms's overarching achievement has been to offer a bridge between populism and avant-gardism. His skill across different mediums, and his love of showmanship, prompted the art historian Joyce Henri Robinson, to refer to Grooms as "a cross between Marcel Duchamp and P. T. Barnum". His influence can be seen in the works of fellow Tennessean artist, art director, illustrator, and puppeteer, Wayne White, and in the paintings of African-American Bob Thompson, and particularly in his energetic use of color. Arts editor M. H. Miller summed up Grooms as "an elder statesman, and premier interpreter, of American pop culture [and] one of the last artists of a bygone era".

Influences and Connections

Influences on Artist

Influenced by Artist

Artists

• Benjamin West
• Lyonel Feininger
• Salvador Dalí
• Henri Matisse
• George Méliès

Friends & Personal Connections

• Alex Katz
• Jim Dine
• Claes Oldenburg
• Yvonne Andersen
• Jay Milder

Movements & Ideas

• Happenings
• Installation Art
• Public Art
• Abstract Expressionism

Artists

• Bob Thompson
• Wayne White

Friends & Personal Connections

• Alex Katz
• Jim Dine
• Claes Oldenburg
• Yvonne Andersen
• Jay Milder

Movements & Ideas

• Installation Art
• Public Art
• Happenings

Open Influences

Close Influences

Useful Resources on Red Grooms