Remembering Robert Whitman

Preparations for Robert Whitman’s American Moon at the Reuben Gallery (November 29 – December 4, 1960) © J. Paul Getty Trust.  Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (2014.M.7)

Tick Studio is one of the sites of The Happenings; a short-lived New York City performance art movement spanning 1958-1963. Focused on hybrid, ephemeral art form making such as installation and performance, theatrical and scrappy Happenings eschewed plot and character development in favor of explorations into the imaginative potential of movement, sound, material, and time.

Artist Robert Whitman, known for his collaborative and deeply experimental work across performance and installation, was a major artist figure in the Happenings in New York in the 1950s and 1960s, and passed Friday, Jan 19 at 88. Read on about his life and work here, here and watch here.

Known as the Rueben Gallery at the time, 44 East 3rd Street held space for exploration in a very specific corner of performance art in downtown Manhattan. Complete with all the requisite characters and chaos, low-budget creative gatherings were staged here, and other places like the Judson Church and the Delancey Street Museum, with figures like Robert Whitman, Red Grooms, Jim Dine, Allan Kaprow, Claes Oldenburg, Carolee Schneeman, Lucas Samaras, Trisha Brown, Tom Wesselman, Yvonne Rainer, and Robert Rauschenberg. 

In 2012, Milly Glimcher, co-founder of Pace Gallery, did a splendid job curating an exhibition at Pace called: “Happenings: New York, 1958-1963,” allowing visitors to wander through sections dedicated to Happenings of all kinds. Grooms’s “A Play Called Fire,” Dine’s “Car Crash,” Kaprow’s “18 Happenings,” Oldenburg’s “Snapshots from the City,” Schneeman’s “Quarry Transposed,” and others. Click here and here for more information on the show. 

We are proud to be among a rich tradition of creativity and exploration here at the studio which began with artistic endeavors of The Happenings and carries on into the present day..