Robert Cumming

Robert Cumming was born in Massachusetts in 1943. He received a B.F.A. in painting from the Massachusetts College of Art, Boston, and an M.F.A. in painting from the University of Illinois, Champagne-Urbana. After school, he taught at the university level for three years while showing his sculpture and painting in several exhibitions throughout the Midwest. In his sculptural practice he built illogical yet utilitarian-looking things that were intentionally devoid of utility. He also engaged in mail art, shipping tree branches and drycleaning tissue, as well as home-made and store-bought postcards, to friends and strangers alike, near and far.

In 1970, Cumming moved to Southern California to seek new exposure within the burgeoning art world around Los Angeles. There, he began to focus on photography, building elaborate tableaux that he shot with exquisite detail with an 8-by-10 camera. In 1973, Cumming first exhibited his photographs as part of the exhibition Minor White, Robert Heinecken, Robert Cumming: Photograph as Metaphor, Photograph as Object, Photograph as Document of Concept, at California State University, Long Beach. Other exhibitions in the 1970s included 24 Young Los Angeles Artists at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Picture Puzzles at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Whitney Biennial in 1975; and Mirrors and Windows at MoMA, New York.

A complete picture of Robert is essential to understanding his singular style that persists through many mediums. Cumming has exhibited his work internationally. The most recent survey of his photography, Robert Cumming: The Secret Life of Objects, opened at the George Eastman Museum and traveled to the California Museum of Photography at UCR ARTSblock in Riverside, California, in fall of 2019. Other solo exhibitions include Robert Cumming: Cone of Vision, a retrospective that traveled to Australia and across the United States with stops at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, as well as over seventy additional solo shows, including Robert Cumming: Intuitive Inventions (Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, 1988), Mechanical Illusions by Robert Cumming (Whitney Museum of American Art, 1986), and The Clutter of Happenstance (MoMA, New York, 1998).