John McCracken

John Harvey McCracken (December 9, 1934 – April 8, 2011) was an American minimalist visual artist. He lived and worked in Los Angeles, Santa Fe, New Mexico, and New York.

Education and teaching After graduating from high school, McCracken served in the United States Navy for four years before enrolling in the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland, earning a B.F.A. in 1962 and completing most of the work for an M.F.A. During these years he studied with Gordon Onslow Ford and Tony DeLap.

Taught: 1965–1966: University of California, Irvine 1966–1968: University of California, Los Angeles 1968–1969: School of Visual Arts, New York City 1971–1972: Hunter College, New York 1972–1973: University of Nevada, Reno 1973–1975: University of Nevada, Las Vegas 1975–1976: University of California, Irvine 1975–1985: College of Creative Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara

Work John McCracken developed his early sculptural work while studying painting as a graduate student at the California College of Arts and Crafts during the late 1950s and early 1960s. He worked alongside artists John Slorp, Peter Schnore, Tom Nuzum, Vincent Perez, and Terry St. John. While experimenting with increasingly three-dimensional canvases, McCracken began to produce art objects made with industrial techniques and materials. His pieces were handcrafted from plywood and surfaced with fiberglass and layers of hand-mixed, reflective, colorful resin.

In 1966, McCracken generated his signature sculptural form: the plank, a narrow, monochromatic, rectangular board format that leans at an angle against the wall (the site of painting) while simultaneously entering into the three-dimensional realm and physical space of the viewer. He conceived the plank idea in a period when artists across the stylistic spectrum were combining aspects of painting and sculpture in their work and many were experimenting with sleek, impersonal surfaces. As the artist noted, "I see the plank as existing between two worlds, the floor representing the physical world of standing objects, trees, cars, buildings, [and] human bodies... and the wall representing the world of the imagination, illusionist painting space, [and] human mental space." The sculptures consist of plywood forms coated with fiberglass and layers of polyester resin. While the polished resin surface recalls the aesthetic of 1960s southern California surfboard and Kustom Kar cultures, the title was drawn from advertising slogans in fashion magazines. In addition to the planks, the artist also creates wall pieces and free-standing sculptures in varying geometrical shapes and sizes, ranging from smaller forms on pedestals to large-scale, outdoor structures in the shape of pyramids, ziggurats, tetrahedrons and occasionally crystals. He worked in highly polished stainless steel and bronze and occasionally made work that in effect sliced the planks into thin, repeating elements that leaned against the wall in rows.

In McCracken's work, color was also used as "material." Bold solid colors with their highly polished finish reflect the unique California light or mirror the observer in a way that takes the work into another dimension. His palette included bubble-gum pink, lemon yellow, deep sapphire and ebony, usually applied as a monochrome. Sometimes an application of multiple colors marbleizes or runs down the sculpture's surface, like a molten lava flow. McCracken typically makes each resin or lacquer work by hand rather than using industrial fabrication. Each is handmade by McCracken himself, who carefully paints them. The monochrome surfaces are sanded and polished many times to such a degree of reflectiveness that they seem translucent. He also made objects of softly stained wood or, in recent years, highly polished bronze and reflective stainless steel. McCracken had lived in Santa Fe since 1994.

Exhibitions

McCracken had his first exhibition at the Nicholas Wilder Gallery in Los Angeles in 1965 and his first in New York at the Robert Elkon Gallery in 1966. He then trailed off, with his next show at Sonnabend Gallery in 1992.

McCracken's art has been included in every important exhibition of Minimalist sculpture in both the United States and Europe, starting with “Primary Structures” at the Jewish Museum in 1966 and with "American Sculpture of the Sixties" at the Los Angeles County Museum.

At auction His top-ten prices at auction all exceed $200,000, including his high auction mark for an eight-foot-tall Black Plank from 1972, in polyester resin, fiberglass, and plywood, that sold for £180,000 ($358,637) at Phillips de Pury & Company London in June 2007. More recently, Flash (2002), a fire-engine-red plank piece in the same media, sold for $290,500 at Christie's New York in November 2010 against an estimate of $120–180,000.

Works in permanent collections

No. 25, 1964, University Art Museum, University of California, Berkeley Nine Planks V, 1974, Laguna Art Museum, Laguna Beach Blue Column, 1967, Los Angeles County Museum of Art Plank, 1976, Los Angeles County Museum of Art Don't Tell Me When to Stop, 1967, Los Angeles County Museum of Art Untitled, 1982, Los Angeles County Museum of Art Mykonos, 1965, Newport Harbor Art Museum, Newport Beach Plank I, 1974, Newport Harbor Art Museum, Newport Beach Pyramid, Newport Harbor Art Museum, Newport Beach Red Cube, 1971, Newport Harbor Art Museum, Newport Beach Untitled, Newport Harbor Art Museum, Newport Beach Blue Post and Lintel I, 1965, Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena Le Baron, Oakland Museum, Oakland Love in Italian, 1967, Oakland Museum, Oakland Nine Planks, IV, 1974, San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art, La Jolla Painting, 1974, San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art, La Jolla Right Down, 1967, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco University Art Museum, University of California, Santa Barbara Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Santa Barbara Blue Post and Lintel, 1970, Honolulu Museum of Art, Honolulu, Hawaii Chimu, 1965, Honolulu Museum of Art, Honolulu, Hawaii Yellow Pyramid, 1965, Honolulu Museum of Art, Honolulu, Hawaii Plank, 1980, K & B Corporation, New Orleans, Louisiana The Absolutely Naked Fragrance, 1967, Museum of Modern Art, New York, New York Naxos, 1965, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, New York Untitled (Pink Box), 1970, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, New York Cosmic Voyage, 1999, Westmoreland Museum of American Art, Greensburg Untitled, 1969, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, New York Violet Block in Two Parts, 1966, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, New York Untitled (Grey Plank), 1978, Rhode Island School of Design Museum, Providence, Rhode Island 23, 1964, Smithsonian American Art Museum Untitled slab painting, resin and fiberglass sculpture, 1981, Smithsonian American Art Museum Green, Minneapolis Institute of Art Mandala V, 1972, Minneapolis Institute of Art You Won't Know Which One Until You've Been to All of Them, 1967, Milwaukee Art Museum, Milwaukee, Wisconsin Red Plank, 1969. The Art Institute of Chicago Black Box #2, 1971, Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, Canada Wing (Aile), 1999, French National Art Collection (FNAC) Gate, 1995, Berardo Museum, Lisbon, Portugal