MIAMI, FLORIDA.- The Lowe Art Museum presents today “Red Grooms: Selections from the Graphic Work,” on view through January 18, 2004. This is a stunning exhibit of more than 100 works, covers forty years of printmaking by one of the best-known American artists working today. Organized and circulated by the Tennessee State Museum, Nashville, TN. Red Grooms: Selections from the Graphic Work, which will make nine additional stops, was organized by the Tennessee State Museum in Grooms’ hometown of Nashville, Tennessee. The exhibit covers more than 40 years of printmaking by the internationally-known artist. The work of Charles Rogers "Red" Grooms reveals the practiced hand of a life-long master draftsman and a perfectionist experienced in all facets of printmaking. 

The exhibit consists of 130 objects, including both two and three-dimensional works. This comprehensive collection of Grooms’ graphic works from 1956 to 1999 offers a display of the artist’s unique mastery of an array of printmaking techniques. It includes a multitude of art forms varying from delicate soft ground etchings, an eight-foot-tall woodblock print to spray-painted stencils. 

Grooms is a prolific, contemporary artist whose work appeals to a broad spectrum of the public, according to exhibit curator Susan Knowles. Grooms is perhaps best known for his self-named "sculpto-pictoramas," large-scale environmental art works constructed with hardware store supplies, she said.  

"Printmaking for Grooms began in making gifts for friends. Later, it became a vehicle to disseminate his vision of the city as a site of invigorating chaos. Finally, it provided an opportunity to work with master craftsmen and to align himself with great artists from the past," according to Vincent Katz, a contributor to the exhibit catalog. 

Grooms, who was born in Nashville, Tennessee in 1937, began his artistic experimentation while attending public schools. In 1955, while a high school senior, Grooms was a participant in a two-man show of 35 paintings at a Nashville gallery. 

In 1957 Grooms moved to New York City to immerse himself in its art scene while working at such odd jobs as a movie house usher. The vibrant color of his hair earned him the name "Red," and his art "Happenings," unstructured live performances, began to gain him a measure of notoriety, according to Knowles. His most famous performance was Burning Building, a 10-minute piece performed nine times in 1959. In Burning Building, Red appeared as "Pasty Man," a good-natured pyromaniac who eludes Keystone Kop-ish firemen. This character re-emerges in Red’s later works as the free-wheeling, toe-tapping anarchist, the infamous "Ruckus." 

In 1962, in part as an outgrowth of his performances, Red made his first important film, Shoot the Moon. A mish-mash of costumes and props and various kinds of visual distortions and animation are the qualities which characterize Red’s film making. In all, he has made 12 films of various lengths. 

Red produced his first major construction work, The City of Chicago, (now in the collection of the Chicago Art Institute) in 1967. It was a large, colorful, satirical view of city life, and it was a tremendous hit with the public. It earned Red a cover article in Look magazine.  

During the 1970s, Grooms paid homage to the Big Apple with Ruckus Manhattan, a public exhibition of the sights, sounds, smells and shapes of Americas biggest melting pot. Ruckus Manhattan was a defining point for Grooms’ career. Throughout the late 1980s and the mid 1990s, Red devoted himself to New York Stories, a series of prints and sculptural tableaux dedicated to the textures of the bustling metropolis.  

After the opening in New York, the Red Grooms: Selections from the Graphic Work exhibit is scheduled to visit nine U.S. cities: the Chicago Cultural Center in Chicago, Illinois; the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts in Montgomery, Alabama; the Museum of Fine Arts in St. Petersburg, Florida; the Plains Arts Museum in Fargo, North Dakota; the Cape Museum of Fine Arts in Dennis, Massachusetts; the Lowe Art Museum-University of Miami in Coral Gables, Florida; the Heckscher Museum of Art in Huntington, New York; the Frist Center for the Visual Arts in Nashville, Tennessee; and the James A. Michener Museum of Art in Doylestown, Pennsylvania. 

The exhibition has been organized in conjunction with the publication of a catalog raisonné of Grooms’ graphic work, Red Grooms: The Graphic Work, written by Nashvillian Walter G. Knestrick, a life-long friend of Grooms and a major collector of his work. Knestrick, a boyhood classmate of Grooms who has collected the artist’s prints over the years, introduces the reader to Red Grooms and tells of his 50-year friendship with the artist from their early artistic experiments in Nashville to their collaboration on this assembly of Red Grooms’ graphic work.