Fred Eversley, who fused artwork and science to create fascinating parabolic sculptures, died on March 14 on the age of 83. A spokesperson for David Kordansky Gallery, which has represented the artist since 2018, advised Hyperallergic that he died unexpectedly following a quick sickness.
Eversley emerged on the Southern California artwork scene within the late Nineteen Sixties, alongside artists together with Larry Bell, DeWain Valentine, and Peter Alexander, whose luminous sculptures, crafted from industrial supplies, captured the distinctive qualities of West Coast gentle. Though he’s related to the Gentle and Area Motion, the title beneath which these artists got here to be identified, what set Eversley aside from his colleagues was his overriding curiosity within the scientific foundation behind his art work, reasonably than any kind of religious or transcendent underpinnings.
Set up view of Fred Eversley: Reflecting Again (the World), 2022–23, Orange County Museum of Artwork, Costa Mesa, California (photograph Yubo Dong, ofstudio)
Born in Brooklyn in 1941, Eversley confirmed an early curiosity in science, utilizing a turntable and pie plate full of jell-o to create parabolic varieties. He studied electrical engineering on the Carnegie Institute of Expertise (now Carnegie Mellon), the place he was the one Black engineering pupil. He moved to Los Angeles in 1963, the place he labored as an engineer for Wyle Laboratories designing acoustic laboratories for NASA. Pissed off by racist housing insurance policies, he settled in Venice Seaside, one of many few built-in neighborhoods on town’s Westside. He spent a lot of his profession in Venice, and earlier than changing into an artist, he would assist neighbors like Judy Chicago and Larry Bell with their engineering issues.
After a debilitating automotive accident in 1967, he left engineering and started experimenting with resin within the studio of artist Charles Mattox, creating his first sculptures, clear cylinders of coloured resin sliced at varied angles. In 1969, he moved into the Frank Gehry-designed studio of the late painter John Altoon, and the next yr, he solid his first full parabolic lens in polyester resin, a kind he would proceed to probe for greater than 5 many years.
“His life was running parallel to the art world and suddenly it truly intersects at precisely the moment and the place where artists were also becoming more interested in the questions that he had been interested in as an engineer,” Whitney Museum of American Artwork curator Kim Conaty mentioned in a 2019 interview.
Set up view of Fred Eversley: Cylindrical Lenses, September 13–October 19, 2024 at David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles (Picture Jeff McLane, courtesy David Kordansky Gallery)
On the suggestion of Robert Rauschenberg, he reached out to New York sellers Betty Parsons and Leo Castelli, who each declined to supply him exhibits, although Parsons did buy some works. A fortuitous assembly with curator Marcia Tucker led to a solo present on the Whitney Museum in 1970, adopted by exhibitions at OK Harris Gallery in New York and Phyllis Type Gallery in Chicago.
Eversley was not neglected; his work resides within the collections of over 40 museums. Nonetheless the extent of fame that a few of his contemporaries achieved proved elusive. The deep scientific basis of his works distinguished him from different Gentle & Area artists, all of whom had been additionally White, and his hard-edged abstractions didn’t match comfortably inside the boundaries of Black Artwork Motion of the Nineteen Sixties and ’70s.
Over the previous decade or so, that started to alter. In 2018, David Kordansky turned the primary and solely gallery to signify him. In 2022, the Orange County Museum of Artwork opened a brand new constructing with a concise retrospective, which expanded on his 1976 solo present on the identical establishment. He created his first out of doors solid resin sculpture in 2023, a fee for the Public Artwork Fund, a towering magenta parabolic monument in Central Park titled “Parabolic Light.” “PORTALS,” his largest public art work, composed of eight monumental metal cylinders, was unveiled in West Palm Seaside late final yr.
Set up view of Fred Eversley: Reflecting Again (the World), 2022–23, Orange County Museum of Artwork, Costa Mesa, California (photograph Yubo Dong, ofstudio)
Regardless of their technical and scientific foundation, Eversley’s sculptures are all about altering notion, and the connection between the viewer, the art work, and the world as it’s mirrored and refracted, themes he by no means uninterested in exploring via numerous variations.
“Eversley’s virtuosity is matched by an understated wit,” wrote Hyperallergic Opinions Editor Natalie Haddad in 2021. “The correspondence between the parabolic lens and the eye can conjure associations with surveillance or panopticism, underscored by the layering of our own reflections with the distorted views and reflections of others.”
Eversley was compelled to depart his Venice studio in 2019 when his landlord refused to resume his lease, transferring full time to his Soho studio in New York, which he had occupied because the late Seventies.
“He had a distinct clarity of vision that was unique and never wavered,” curator Cassandra Coblentz, who conceived the 2022 OCMA present, advised Hyperallergic. “He approached his work with tremendous integrity and for decades he remained persistent in his dedication to honing his craft. I was always struck by the delight he took in exploring the subtlest nuance that would push his vision forward.”
Set up view of Fred Eversley: Cylindrical Lenses, September 13–October 19, 2024 at David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles (Picture Jeff McLane, courtesy David Kordansky Gallery)
