Marty Greenbaum
Brooklyn, NY
b. 1934
Marty Greenbaum was born in 1934 in Brooklyn, New York. He received his BA in 1956 from theUniversity of Arizona, and his MA from Brooklyn College in 1991. He is the recipient of a 1974 National Endowment for the Arts grant. His work has been exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art; the Museum of Contemporary Crafts, New York; the Brooklyn Museum; the National Gallery of Art,Washington, D.C.,; and the Centre Pompidou, Paris, among others. His work is in the public collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Brooklyn Museum, and the Jacksonville Art Museum. The artist lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.
Marty Greenbaum is a multifaceted artist who has worked in photography, film, assemblage and artist bookmaking. He participated in Allan Kaprow's infamous Happenings between 1962 - 1965, and appeared in films by Adolphus Mekas and Robert Frank. Greenbaum's influence derives mainly from his urban environment, Joseph Cornell, and the inquisitive nature of the camera. His gritty assemblages have fetishistic qualities to them, as if they were discarded material that the artist unearthed from an archaeological find. The constructions are made up of found objects, like effigies to a disappearing culture. They belong to the burgeoning experimentation with assemblage, collage and the use of unconventional materials in the 1960's and 1970's avant-garde art scenes.
