The Temporary Contemporary at MOCA
This retrospective surveyed over twenty-five years of Red Grooms’s career, starting with his relocation to New York City from his hometown of Nashville, Tennessee, in 1956. The artist’s early work comprised drawings, paintings, and reliefs that merged Expressionist and cartoonish styles. In the 1970s, Grooms began constructing painted papier-mâché sculptures and tableaux, including Ruckus Manhattan (1975–1976), a 6,400 square foot “sculptural comic book” of New York City created with the artist Mimi Gross. Selections from this piece, as well as portions of an earlier “sculpto-pictorama” called The Discount Store (1970), were included in the retrospective.
For the installation of Red Grooms: A Retrospective, 1956–1984 at The Temporary Contemporary, Grooms and his partner Lysiane Luong created Tut’s Fever, a massive, functional theater designed as a caricature of 1920s neo-Egyptian movie palaces. In 1987, Tut’s Fever was reinstalled at the Museum of the Moving Image, New York, where it remains on view today.
The exhibition was accompanied by a catalogue published by the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts.
Red Grooms: A Retrospective, 1956–1984 was organized by Judith E. Stein of the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts.
The Temporary Contemporary is the original name of The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA.