Red Grooms

Sculptor, painter, and performance artist, born in Nashville, Tennessee, USA. He studied at the Art Institute of Chicago, the New School for Social Research, NY, and the Hans Hofmann School, MA, then settled in New York City (1957). He founded Ruckus Productions (1963), a multi-media environmental and performance company, and is known both for his lifesize installations and for his impromptu happenings and other theatrical events.

Red Grooms (born Charles Rogers Grooms on June 7, 1937) is an American multimedia artist best known for his colorful pop-art constructions depicting frenetic scenes of modern urban life.

Grooms was born in Nashville, Tennessee during the middle of the Great Depression. He studied at the Art Institute of Chicago and then at Peabody College in Nashville. Grooms moved to New York City in 1956 to study at the New School for Social Research. In 1957, Grooms attended a summer session at the Hans Hoffman School of Fine Arts in Provincetown, Massachusetts.

During the late 1950s and early 1960s, Grooms made a number of "Happenings". These vibrant three-dimensional constructions melded painting and sculpture to create immersive works of art that invited interaction from the viewer. These works were done in collaboration with his wife at the time, and artist in her own right, Mimi Gross. In the 1990s Grooms returned to his Tennessee roots, creating likenesses of 36 figures from Nashville history for the Tennessee Foxtrot Carousel (1998).

Besides painting and sculpture, Grooms is also know for his prolific printmaking. His art is included in the collections of thirty-nine museums, including the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Carnegie Museum of Art.

In 2003, Grooms was awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award by the National Academy of Design.