Red Grooms

Charles Rogers Grooms was born in Nashville in 1937. A self-described beatnik artist, he moved to New York at the age of twenty, adopting the nickname Red after being renamed for his first one-man show at The Sun Gallery. In the late 1950's, Grooms experimented with performance art and filmmaking. He wrote and staged several "happenings" in conjunction with solo shows of his art work, including A Play Called Fire (1958) and The Burning Building (1959). His first film Shoot the Moon (1962) is a rendering of Georges Melies' A Trip to the Moon (1902). In 1986 Grooms illustrated the children's book Rembrandt Takes A Walk, written by Mark Strand.

Grooms is best known today for his large scale "sculpto-pictoramas," such as The Bus, a mixed-media, 22-foot-long, almost-life-sized replica of a city bus with whimsical caricatures of travelers and a driver whose head swivels as you board. Ruckus Rodeo, a larger-than-life depiction of the Fort Worth rodeo composed of sculpture wire, canvas, burlap and acrylic paint that requires 1,237 square feet of gallery space was also done in this style.

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