Red Grooms

Red Grooms (b. 1937) is an American multimedia artist best known for his colorful pop-art collage sculptures depicting bustling and humorous city scenes. He was born Charles Rogers Grooms in Nashville, Tennessee during the middle of the Great Depression. While working as a dishwasher at a restaurant in Provincetown, Massachusetts, Grooms was given the nickname "Red" by Dominic Falcone of the local Sun Gallery. Grooms attended a summer session at the Hans Hofmann School of Fine Arts in Provincetown and became involved in the experimental art scene there and in New York. He collaborated on several short films with animation pioneer Yvonne Andersen and put on experimental performances during the late 1950s and early 1960s.

Grooms's Willem de Kooning celebrates the Abstract Expressionist painter, whose work of the 1950s were a formative influence on Grooms. Grooms references de Kooning's work, and includes visual puns, such as de Kooning literally “breaking through” the surface of the print, suggesting the transformative nature of de Kooning’s artistic contribution.

Today, Grooms is recognized as a pioneer of site-specific sculpture and installation art. Grooms's work has been exhibited in galleries nationally and internationally, and his art is included in the collections of thirty-nine museums, including the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts, and the Carnegie Museum of Art. In 2003, Grooms was awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award by the National Academy of Design. Grooms currently lives and works in New York City in a studio in lower Manhattan, where he has lived for over 40 years.