Remembering Robert Grosvenor, Quietly Elegant Sculptor of the Ordinary and Peripheral

It was 1978, and I was sitting in the first row of a medium-size classroom at the Rhode Island School of Design. RISD was a good school. We had a robust lineup of speakers. Mostly they were painters, sometimes there was a sculptor, always they were men listing their shows and presenting their artworks in precious detail. I was open to believing in their importance. 

Enter Bob Grosvenor, showing some images but saying almost nothing by way of description, though he politely answered a few how-to questions. I can so clearly remember my exact seat in the room, the mystery of seeing Bob’s eloquent work, my intense excitement shared with a small cadre of aspirants, and the ensuing understanding that art-making was an unexplainable activity that could involve having a good time and being honorable. Grosvenor’s use of scale seemed out of reach, but his dedication to ordinary materials jibed with our midnight scavenging trips to Providence construction sites for wood and rebar. Mixing plaster, cooking tar, and melting wax and schmearing Bondo were our accompanying, if toxic, methodologies. 

Moving to Tribeca and setting up a studio in 1984, I felt a bit lost but grounded by having the Grosvenor Building around the corner on Broadway (built in 1875 as a place to make umbrellas and typewriters) and Elizabeth Murray across Sixth Avenue on White Street. Beyond that, being a woman and a mother put me on the outside of the “art world.” I was fortunate to take refuge in academia, where I could happily introduce my students to art that I loved. I never missed a Grosvenor show and reveled in the puzzlement of some students and the delight of others. His work was so quietly articulate there was always a lot to discuss.

At the time, I was making small wooden things stuffed with CelluClay (like papier-mâché) in a basement studio, but I was also needing to paint and find color. When I stumbled into making acrylic paint skins and embedding them into plaster forms, I felt I could finally breathe. That I could accept the things I was making, however stubborn, mute, and handmade they seemed, was, in part, because RG had shown me the way. 

Grosvenor didn’t fly; he drove places and traveled on water. As an acute observer of happenstance, it makes sense that he would want to delight in and record (in his wonderful photos) inspirational moments in the built environment (stone walls, roofs, lawn ornaments, and floating donuts). The edges of things, the peripheral, the casual, and an extreme precision jostled together with great humor in all his work. 

For his 1974 Storm King Art Center commission, he inserted a flat steel plate with attached planar flying buttresses into the ground, predating a similar gesture by Richard Serra by 15 years. His car collecting “hobby” yielded astounding vehicular sculptures saturated with surprising color (pearly purple, etc.) and transformed with Bondo (common car repair stuff) fill-in. Looking at the final work, I felt that his search for shape, the itch to uncover an essential form using equal parts car and filler (building up with filler as a way of stripping down), was a sexy, steamy dance. 

The cantilever was a big sculptural move that RG handled lightly. Often, he had it turn into a “hover.” Early on, this is what he was known for. In a way, this sculptural strategy involved an expectation of movement that I now see as related to the cars, the boats, and the model airplanes: things meant to move, both still and restless, but which then become other things. 

Grosvenor knew how to mess around with big things and took his work seriously. He was in it for the long haul and put on display his love for making things. His work showed me how to play. I had my first phone conversation with him a couple of years ago, and we chuckled about a few things and talked about art stuff. He was kind, and his voice was soft and open.

He seemed very pleased to be alive and looking around.