Red Grooms
Red Grooms’s aptly titled Ruckus Manhattan captures the essence of both the man and his artwork: boisterous, energetic, and urban-oriented. Conceived in 1975, it stands as the artist’s most iconic work, from which many others evolved. Emerging in the decades after the heyday of the Abstract Expressionists, Grooms borrowed from them large-scale formats, innovative uses of materials, and the freedom to express his own passions and sense of humor.
Charles Rogers Grooms was born in 1937 in Nashville, Tennessee, the home of the Grand Ole Opry, well known for its diversity of colorful performers. Showing an early interest in art, he took drawing lessons as a ten-year-old at the local Children’s Museum and continued with night classes during high school. Later he reflected on his childhood, "Growing up in Nashville in the 1950s I felt cooped up, locked into every kind of straitjacket you can imagine. But, like every family, mine had its share of eccentrics and nuts, so it wasn't all that bizarre not to fit in.…I was pretty clear that I was going to be an artist, which is a fairly regular variety of oddball." [1]
In 1955, he enrolled at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, but dropped out before the end of the semester. He returned to Nashville and attended the George Peabody College for Teachers for a year. At the age of twenty, Grooms went to Provincetown, Massachusetts, for the summer to study with Hans Hofmann, the highly regarded teacher known for his push-pull color theory. Enthralled by the art scene on Cape Cod, which included theater as well as the visual arts, Grooms spent several summers there after moving to New York City in 1957. He quickly became involved in Happenings—an art form that involved acting, collaboration, sound effects, and lots of color.
In the 1960s, Grooms produced prints, collages, and paintings, as well as films, in various locations including Florence, Maine, and Chicago. Late in the decade he began to create his large walk-in installations, which were designed for specific spaces, usually commercial galleries. Working with others, including his wife Mimi Gross, he relied on invention and improvisation, and typically peopled his creations with stereotypes of ordinary folk that recall the caricatures of William Hogarth and Honoré Daumier. These tableaux reflect Grooms’s own fertile and energized world.
Perhaps his most ambitious project was the large-scale environment Ruckus Manhattan, a satirical model featuring such famed landmarks as the Statue of Liberty, the World Trade Center, the subway, and the Brooklyn Bridge. Fabricated from lumber, canvas, fiberglass, and found objects, its surfaces are crude, flashy, and reminiscent of the city's glitzy atmosphere. The success and vitality of Ruckus Manhattan led to similar regional manifestations in Philadelphia, Cleveland, Fort Worth, and Minneapolis. After a whirlwind of creative activity making oversize environments, Grooms came to the startling realization that most of his work, after its initial installation, remained in storage. As he explained: "They're Frankensteins to me, and I have mixed feelings about them. I don't like to have them in storage, but if I take them out [for a show] they require a lot of time and energy I could be using for new stuff." [2] As a result, he began to diversify his output, turning to printmaking and bronze sculpture, which has allowed a broader dissemination of his work and his love of life.
Notes:
[1] Grooms, interview with Carter Ratcliff, 1981–1984, in Carter Ratcliff, Red Grooms (New York: Abbeville Press, 1984), 233.
[2] Grooms, as quoted in Ratcliff, Grooms, 170.
