The Pickup's Arts & Culture coverage is supported by Brut Hotel, featuring a rooftop VIP after party for Tulsa Irish Fest on March 14.
Bruce Goff’s work, be it music, buildings, or sketches, was influenced, it seems, by every place and thing he encountered: Japan, indigenous America, jazz, baroque art, absurdism, household objects, abstract maximalism; concepts and materials alike. In “Bruce Goff: Material Worlds,” a retrospective at The Art Institute of Chicago, this abundance of inspiration is made clear through an unpredictable and delightful presentation of his work.
As The Pickup’s man in Chicago who has made it to Tulsa a few times, I took on the mission to review the show before it closes on March 29.
Bruce Goff was born in 1904, in the tiny farm town of Alton, Kansas. His childhood is described as “nomadic,” but a great deal of his personal and professional development occurred in Tulsa. At 12, his aptitude for drawing landed him an apprenticeship with the Tulsa architectural firm Rush, Endacott and Rush. At 22, he helped design the iconic Boston Avenue Methodist Church in Tulsa, solidifying his influence on the growing city.
The Great Depression, and the end of his marriage, forced his move to Chicago, where his career continued to expand to new mediums with wilder influences. Throughout his career, he collected an impressive roster of peer-admirers from within the world of architecture; names like Mies van der Rohe and Frank Lloyd Wright, who eventually became a mentor for him. He continued to thrive, moving to the University of Oklahoma, working and teaching architecture, until he resigned as the result of a smear campaign against him for being a gay man.
From Goff’s life, a body of work that is precisely individual emerges. This collection of architectural drawings, models, and paintings reflects a worldview, a politic, a person with pinpoint potency, and solidifies Goff’s work as sprawling, idiosyncratic, playful, weird, bold, intimate, and physical.
Architectural historian Charles Jencks dubbed him the “Michelangelo of kitsch.” It’s a label that the Art Institute’s exhibit essentially displays as a thesis statement. Apparently Goff himself was slightly irritated by the label. I think it fits.