Chicago

For almost forty years the New York artist Red Grooms has been constructing three-dimensional tableaux that sardonically comment on the gritty urban life of America’s large metropolitan centers.  Termed “sculpto-picto-ramas” by the artist, works consist of garishly painted fabric, wood, and metal elements assembled into walk-in shadow boxes of distorted city views populated by equally expressive, frequently notable denizens.  Grooms temporarily moved to Chicago in the fall of 1967 to create and install a twenty-five foot square environmental piece of the Allan Frumkin Gallery, the 1968 City of Chicago (now in the collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago), the first of a series of regional assemblages, before returning to New York around 1970.  This small painted metal construction was produced in Chicago during the fabrication of the Frumkin Gallery installation, which featured a north-south view of Michigan Avenue at the river.

The piece, which turns the view 45°, looking west along the river with its bridges and high-rise constructions along the banks, was the prototype for a multiple (which was ultimately too expensive to produce) in which the entire scene is ingeniously created by the cutting and folding of a single sheet of thin metal.