Robert Cumming

Born in 1943 in Massachusetts, Robert Cumming moved to the West Coast in 1970 where he quickly became a prominent figure of the Californian conceptual art scene, before moving back to the East Coast in the 1980s. He settled back in California in 2015 until his passing in 2021. Trained in painting, drawing and photography at the Massachusetts College of Art, Boston (B.F.A., 1965) and the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana (M.F.A., 1967), Cumming spent the early part of his career producing sculptures and mail art in the late 1960s, focused on photography from 1968 to the early 1980s, before devoting the rest of his career to drawing, painting, collage, sculpture and architectural studies.

Robert Cumming achieved rapid success as part of a group of close artists including AA Bronson, Robert Heinecken, Ed Ruscha, William Wegman, under the mentorship of Douglas Huebler, and participated in numerous important exhibitions—including Art by Telephone at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (1969) and Whitney Biennials (1977,1981)—until several solo exhibitions and retrospectives were organised at the Whitney Museum, New York (1986), Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (1993), FRAC Limousin, Limoges, France (1994), Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (1994) and Museum of Modern Art, New York (1998). At the invitation of Leo Castelli, Robert Cumming was represented in the 1980s and 1990s by Castelli Graphics in New York, where he was able to showcase his artistic practice in all its diversity, from photography and sculpture to painting and drawing.

His work is held in major museum collections including Metropolitan Museum of Art and Museum of Modern Art, New York, Art Institute of Chicago, Centre Pompidou, Paris, J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, Victoria and Albert Museum, London, Hirshhorn Museum and Scupture Garden, Washington D.C., San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Louisiana Museum, Humlebaek, Denmark, as well as Kyoto Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto.