Red Grooms | Biography | Hollis Taggart Galleries

Red Grooms (b. 1937)

Born in Nashville, Tennessee in 1937, Grooms’ career spanned many different developments within American art. He enrolled at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and Art Students League before studying with Abstract Expressionist painter Hans Hofmann in Provincetown. However, like many of the Pop artists, Grooms was not interested in painting in an Abstract Expressionist style. Although he retained the brushwork of gesture painting, Grooms wanted to work figuratively, and therefore he studied with Hofmann for only a short time. While in Provincetown, Grooms became involved with the Sun Gallery and was introduced to the circle of artists exhibiting there, including gallery owner Yvonne Anderson, Allan Kaprow and Lester Johnson. Through the Provincetown group he met George Segal, Alex Katz, and filmmaker Rudy Burckhardt. Throughout his career Grooms would create over a dozen films, collaborating with Anderson on a number of projects including the short films Spaghetti Trouble (1963) Fat Feet (1966) and Meow Meow (1970). Out of these works Grooms developed many of the characters that would appear in his sculptures.

In 1958 he received his first solo exhibition at the Sun Gallery and also participated in a group exhibitions entitled “Duality of City Life and Life in the Sun” and the “The City,” which paired his work with Lester Johnson, Robert Frank, and Anderson. Two years later Grooms had his first solo show in New York at the Reuben Gallery, where Dine, Oldenburg, Segal and Lucas Samaras also exhibited. As Lawrence Alloway described the type of work shown by the gallery. “The city and its inhabitants was not only the subject of much of this art, it was also, literally, the substance, providing the texture and bulk of the material itself.” (6) The vibrancy of the city continued to provide the major inspiration for Grooms’ later work. In the seventies and eighties, he focused on the series New York Stories, which included both sculpture and prints. A masterful draftsman, Grooms produced numerous etchings, woodblocks prints, and three-dimensional graphic works throughout his career.

His work can be found in numerous national and international collections including the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois; Fort Worth Museum of Contemporary Art. Fort Worth Texas; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, New York; Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, California; Museum of Modern Art, New York, New York; and the Nagoya City Museum, Nagoya, Japan.