The Public Artworks of Rockne Krebs and Sam Gilliam, Built and Unbuilt
Through funding from the DC Commission on the Arts, Day Eight produced the exhibition, “The Public Artworks of Rockne Krebs and Sam Gilliam, Built and Unbuilt”, curated by Mollie Berger Salah, exhibition director Robert Bettmann. Below is the catalog essay published for the exhibition.
The Public Artworks of Rockne Krebs & Sam Gilliam
by John Anderson
Making visual art is typically a solitary act. It’s not produced in front of an audience, and few artists work in a group. As an act, making visual art is probably more comparable to monastic meditation than any other professional or creative discipline. And, just as the artwork was once created alone by the artist, it is commonly viewed alone by a single individual.
An exception to this scenario is the public artwork. Public art is almost never produced alone, and is commonly created by a committee (or committees) in interaction with an artist or artistic team. In all manner of creative considerations, including subject matter, public art differs from art created for gallery display. Unlike work intended for private display, public artworks are designed to engage the masses.
The visual artist making work for an individual to view is emboldened to take certain risks. The risk in public art isn’t the artists alone: a poorly received public art work equally impacts a commissioning entity, or individual. Risk is managed by all participants in the creative process. There are the carefully crafted “Requests For Qualifications”, evaluation of resumes, portfolio reviews, proposal invitations and budget reviews. Drawings and plans are made, and scale models rendered.If selected, work is fabricated, shipped, and installed. The process may involve architects, engineers, accountants, machinists, financiers, construction crews, union laborers, and politicians. Along the way, artistic changes may be necessary because of budget, height and load restrictions, environmental conditions, and more.
This exhibition on the subject of public artworks by Rockne Krebs and Sam Gilliam owes much to access to the archives of the Rockne Krebs Trust, managed by his daughter, Heather Krebs, as it does to architect Steve Spurlock, who assisted Gilliam on a number of projects. And it allows us to revisit the trajectory of two of Washington, D.C.’s brightest art stars.
The pathways Sam Gilliam and Rockne Krebs navigated from gallery to public art commissions had some similarities. While their works could not be more different, many parallels unite these two artists who once had a seemingly inseparable friendship. Studiomates, for three decades they worked out of the same building – first at the Johnson Avenue, and later in studios on U Street. Both gained notice by the mid 1960s, both exhibited at the Jefferson Place Gallery for many years, and both had early successes with museum shows in D.C. and beyond.
Public art, almost by necessity, requires scale. It’s in the open: away from a studio, gallery, or home. It competes with buildings, passersby, car horns, landscape. It blends into the scenery, because it is most often viewed in passing. And 99 times out of 100, it is expected to be there tomorrow, next month, and often times next decade, requiring materials that will withstand the elements: wind, rain, snow, ice, and harsh sunlight. But for both artists, it wasn’t certain from the offset that either would be placing their works in the public square.
Expectant Beginnings
Sam Gilliam first emerged in a 1963 group exhibition at Adams Morgan Gallery that included Howard Mehring, to whom his hard-edged abstraction was quickly compared.1 Over the next four years his work was defined by the rectangle, and indebted to the Washington Color School. When he first broke away from a hard edge painting technique, and applied paint with a stained approach akin to Morris Louis, Washington Star critic Benjamin Forgey considered it a step backwards.2 But he also noticed promise within the work. A year later, with the artist’s exhibition at the Phillips Collection, Forgey’s tune changed, declaring, “the artist had arrived.”3
Gilliam’s work was never defined by small scale, often stretching beyond 10-feet in its greatest dimension. His eventual massive scale was foreshadowed in 1968 by a painting in the Jefferson Place Gallery’s 10th Anniversary exhibition. Selected by curators Walter Hopps, director of the Corcoran Gallery at Dupont Center, and James Harithas, the new director of the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Gilliam’s four-panel piece had “the place of honor” in the exhibition.4 Dwarfing adjacent works by Robert Gates and Helene Herzbrun, two of the Gallery’s founders, a better metaphor for the evolution of the Jefferson Place could not be had. Krebs, who was also included in the exhibition, had his work described as “the most remarkable sculpture on hand…. The piece, for all its austerity, really is magical.”5
Click to read bio of Walter Hopps
Krebs’ ascendancy in DC sculpture was also magical. Between 1966 and 1967, he went from virtual unknown, to 1st prize for Sculpture at the Corcoran Area Annual, acceptance to the Whitney Museum’s annual sculpture exhibition, and his first solo (of four) at the Jefferson Place Gallery. In his first show at the Jefferson his work was described as too large for the space,6 but even larger scale was already in his sights. In March of 1968 he had a work accepted to the U.S. Pavilion at Hemisfair, in San Antonio, TX. Made of Plexiglass, the 12-foot tall “Clear” worked with the landscape, creating what Paul Richard described as a semi-invisible room.7
Early in 1968, Krebs received a workshop assistance grant from the Washington Gallery of Modern Art, through which he began collaboration with Paul R. Haldemann, an electrical engineering research associate at the University of Maryland. Haldemann’s research sought to extend the life of gas lasers beyond 100 hours, and Krebs was interested in the sculptural potential of the beam.
Click to read bio of Paul Haldemann
Just one month after the Jefferson Place Gallery 10th Anniversary exhibition, Haldemann helped Krebs install “Sculpture Minus Object” at the Washington Gallery of Modern Art; it is the first identified piece of 3-D laser art. And it came with a learning curve. The lasers were displayed in the space through a series of carefully focused mirrors, and, according to Haldemann, the weight of so many people in the gallery during the opening caused the floor to sag just enough to ruin the mirrors’ alignment, turning off the artwork.8 Described by attending critic Forgey as “an interesting failure” of “a certain sensuously communicable intensity.”9 Krebs indoor piece was accompanied by an exterior one: a two-beamed searchlight truck that shot a V-shape into the night sky.
As Director of the new Corcoran Gallery at Dupont Center, Walter Hopps established workshops in design, architecture, photography, painting and sculpture — the latter two taught by Gilliam and Krebs respectively. 10 And, through the Stern Foundation, Hopps secured rent-free studio space for Gilliam and Krebs on Johnson Avenue (near 14th and R Streets), along with a $5000 fellowship payment. Each artist had a full floor of work space, enough to host workshops, and resident assistants, as well as to consider large artworks.Around the same time, Hopps selected Gilliam and Krebs, along with Ed McGowin, for an exhibition on the second floor of the Corcoran’s downtown gallery. “Gilliam, Krebs, McGowin” opened in the fall of 1969, coinciding with a survey of David Smith to draw some national attention.11 Their artworks informed by recent successes, each artist continued to stretch his wings.
In April 1969, Gilliam had jettisoned the stretcher bars for an installation at the Jefferson Place Gallery. Entitled “Swing”, the free-flowing work consumed a small room in the back of the gallery. Canvas stretched wall-to-wall and hung from the ceiling, transforming the space into soft architecture. Now, six months later at the Corcoran, he went even larger. Had they laid flat, instead of draped unevenly through the galleries, most of the works were 10’ x 75’. Exceeding this figure was “Baroque Cascade,” a piece that stretched 150-feet in length, weaving back and forth across the expanse of the Corcoran’s second floor atrium, allowing visitors to view the work from below.
For Krebs, successive displays of laser beams at the Dupont Center, and again in March of 1969 at the Jefferson Place Gallery, played heavily into the design of his work for “Gilliam, Krebs, McGowin.” “Ra” used a prism to split an argon beam into five beams of varied color, running 200 feet across the gallery.12 Nina Felshin, who helped Hopps curate the exhibition, suggested the laser wasn’t what made the work extraordinary: it was the way Krebs directed baffled sunlight into the sculpture. “As I recall, he replaced whatever aged material was used for one or more of the skylight windows with clear plexi. The light was immaterial, just like the laser light, but it appeared to be a discrete form because of the way he constructed the baffle.”13 A shaft of sunlight would pierce the gallery darkness for an hour each afternoon, and, as the Washington Post’s Paul Richard described it, “the plane of light is like walking through a wall.”14
Prior to the opening of “Gilliam, Krebs, McGowin,” September 1969, technology company Hewlitt-Packard offered Krebs a singular opportunity: stipend and chance to roam their Palo Alto facilities, learning what he could. The residency was in conjunction with an Art and Technology Program at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. In 1970, his work exhibited at the LA County Museum, and then in Osaka, Japan as part of the 1970 World’s Fair.
Gilliam remained similarly in the spotlight after “Gilliam, Krebs, McGowin,” with a solo at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City in 1971, a Guggenheim Fellowship, as well as several prominent residencies, and group exhibitions. Hopps included Gilliam’s work in the 36th Venice Biennale in 1972, and Gilliam also began to explore printmaking. Simultaneously, he continued to create canvas works of extraordinary size. Gilliam’s “Autumn Surf,” created for the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, was composed on a 450 foot, by 15 foot, piece of painted polypropylene. Both artists had overcome any issue of scale, and were prepared for public art commissions.
Gilliam Goes Public
“Autumn Surf” was soon dwarfed by “Sea Horses.” Installed on the exterior of the Philadelphia Museum of Art in the summer of 1975, Gilliam dangled six sheets of polypropylene—14,800 square feet of material—over the sides of the museum’s walls. The work shifted with the wind: in form and movement, the work was aptly named. What seemed like a departure from his earlier immersive environments of draped canvas, was in fact a return to simpler knots and drapes akin to those first seen in 1968 and 1969.15 The form also reflected Gilliam’s willingness to flow between ideas and media within his studio practice. While Gilliam continued to work with soft forms well into the 21st Century, his studio process would eventually embrace watercolor, printmaking, and other formalist approaches, as well as stretched and shaped canvases that, at times, bulged from the wall.
Other public-facing works followed the Philadelphia Museum commission, including an installation at ArtPark (1977); his first public commission, “Triple Variants” for the Richard B. Russell Federal Building in Atlanta (1979); and “Dupont Circle Grand,” part of the Washington Project for the Art’s Art Site Program (1980). With exception to the work in Atlanta—which was installed in the building’s atrium—these commissions were expected to be temporary, allowing Gilliam exploit the fluid nature of canvas. But this would not always be so with Gilliam’s public commissions.
In 1979/1980, Gilliam was invited to submit a proposal for an installation in a courthouse building, the Richard J. Hughes Justice Complex in Trenton, NJ. The building was still under construction, and the artist realized that he needed help understanding the architectural drawings provided for the site. Chris Middendorf, whose eponymous gallery represented Gilliam, reached out on Sam’s behalf to one of his collectors, whose partner was an architect, Joe Wnuk. Unable to consider the project himself, Wnuk passed the assignment down to one of his younger employees, Steven Spurlock.16“Kind of a funny story. I put a coat and tie on, and went to meet with Sam thinking this was a big thing,” Spurlock recalled. “He took one look at me and started laughing.” It was not a job interview, Spurlock learned. “Sam just needed someone to help him out.” Within a couple hours, they agreed Spurlock would build a three-foot maquette of the installation space. He worked in the upper loft of Gilliam’s studio, then on U Street, for the next few weeks, building the piece with Gilliam’s assistant, Steve Frietch. They didn’t get that commission, but they had produced an elegant and professional-looking presentation. Thus began a working relationship between Gilliam and Spurlock that continued over the next two decades, producing plans for eight works (built and unbuilt.)
Their next proposal, also submitted in 1980, was realized: “Sculpture with a D” was one of 20 artworks created within the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority’s northwest extension of the Red Line. Measuring 15’ 7” high, and 44’ 10” wide, the piece, consisting of nearly three dozen brightly colored panels, hangs above the platform at the Davis Square Station.
Click to view bio of Steven L Spurlock
Spurlock’s challenge was to figure a way to get these various elements—as conceived by Gilliam—onto the wall. Per requirements from the commissioning entity (The City of Cambridge, Massachusetts), the work needed to survive in place for 75 years.17 Spurlock had to account for the wind and rattle of trains below, and surface vibrations above. The work had to withstand vandalism, and occasional cleaning by hose. Durable materials were required, meaning canvas was out. Aluminum was in: a material Gilliam would continue to use, for both gallery and public work, in the decades that followed.18
Spurlock and Frietch again made a model to visualize the space for the proposal. To attach and support the artwork, Spurlock devised a steel grid which served two purposes: it met the needs of the station construction with minimally invasive and stable attachment points, and it allowed Gilliam the flexibility to adjust placement of the panels along the grid in a manner that did not affect the grid’s relationship to the attachment points.
“There was a split-faced block: that’s a concrete block that has a decorative face to it: the finish on the train side,” Spurlock described of the surface the art would hang against. “Behind that was a substantial concrete retaining wall. We had to attach some type of support to the retaining wall. Then they would come back and build the split face wall around our attachment points, and then we would have to come and assemble [Gilliam’s] piece on top.”19Regardless of the artwork’s design, an architect was essential to figure out how to get the piece on the wall, and within the building schedule. Like the complex in Trenton, the Davis Square Station had not yet been built when the artwork was selected.
Over time, changes in technology affected the working process. Plans for Davis Square were developed by hand. 15 years later, when working on plans for a project at LaGuardia Airport, Spurlock developed them digitally. “[The computer] made figuring out how to build the one at LaGuardia a little easier because I could model things in three dimensions on the computer and… triangulate that point in space to the attachment point to figure out the geometry.” This was essential for what appeared to be hundreds of perforated pieces of aluminum, spinning through space. Anchored by a steel pole that runs down the center of the sculpture, Gilliam’s work is suspended from the ceiling by a series of cables. Manufactured in Lorton, VA, the work traveled to New York with each part numbered in sequence for assembly in the newly renovated concourse.20
Since Gilliam and Krebs were friends, and both had studios in the same building on U Street, Spurlock also had the opportunity to work with Rockne on one occasion. “I don’t recall him ever working with assistants,” reflected Spurlock. When they worked together Spurlock helped Krebs build a model to visualize the path of the sun across a building for a prism installation. “He was more intuitive,” recalled Spurlock, reflecting that the plans didn’t indicate exact placement of prisms, or ways to affix them to the structure. “I think he liked to get into the nuts and bolts of what he did, a lot.”21
Click to view archival material for the public artworks of Sam Gilliam
Going Public: Krebs
Krebs capacity to absorb technical information from scientists—first Haldemann, and later at Hewlett Packard—was likely impacted by his experience in the Navy, working with radar. No other working artist was able to similarly master the materials Krebs created with. Over time, he grew to have an advanced researchers detailed knowledge of the capacity, and technological requirements, of lasers. His pieces at the Dupont Center, Jefferson Place Gallery, and the Corcoran overcame typical laser issues associated with power source, gas life, and overheating. From those early works he learned the benefit of working with front-facing mirrors, which reflect crisper lines over larger spaces (back-facing mirrors, like those in most bathrooms, can reflect a second beam off the glass).22
His installations varied in scale, expanding and contracting with the size of rooms he was given, whether at the Jefferson Place Gallery, Washington Gallery of Modern Art, the Corcoran, or inside the U.S. World’s Fair Pavilion in Osaka, Japan. Also in 1970, he created the first ever urban-scale laser environment, commissioned by Mr. and Mrs. Philip M. Stern, for outside their Kalorama Triangle home in Washington, D.C. The Stern Line was installed in their home at 2103 S Street, NW, and could be seen from nearby Mitchell Park bouncing off their chimney and cutting across the backyard of their residence. The beam continued across the Connecticut Avenue Bridge, and the Calvert Street Bridge half a mile away.23 Philip B. Stern’s mother, Edith Rosenwald Stern, would commission Krebs to produce a piece, “Rite de Passage,” for the New Orleans Museum of Art the following year. By the time it was completed in November of 1971, Krebs had also completed outdoor pieces for museums in Buffalo, Los Angeles, and Minneapolis.Back in DC, in 1972, Krebs created a city-scale laser work as part an “Art for McGovern” exhibition. That piece, which flew from the window of a Georgetown home, was programmed to flash once a second for as many seconds as there had been lives lost during the Vietnam War.24
In 1973, the Philadelphia Museum of Art commissioned a laser work to illuminate the city during a 10-day festival. “Sky Pie” crisscrossed the city with star-like precision. Critic Benjamin Forgey, writing in the Washington Star, described the beam slowly becoming visible as dusk turned to night, and lamented that Washington hadn’t yet experienced an installation like this.25
Krebs didn’t often work with architects, but he didn’t work alone, either. The scale and scope of his works—spanning buildings and cities—required a team. Alan Wald worked in the studio. Ed Perry was a certified laser tech. Sid Smith helped on site. They, along with numerous others, paid and volunteer, would install elements, or adjust mirrors and prisms, sometimes coordinating over walkie-talkies. There were also, regularly, nervous politicians that needed talking to, worried that a laser might blind a constituent. (According to Haldemann, you could look into an old gas laser and not hurt your eye, unlike today’s LED and solid state lasers.) For his 1974 installation in D.C., Krebs and Haldemann had to assure both the National Park Service and the Secret Service that his lasers wouldn’t damage or vaporize nearby buildings.26
The public artwork, entitled “Irish Light,” fired across the mall as part of Art Now ’74, an 18-day arts festival. The piece consisted of three argon lasers: one fired from Georgetown, one from Rosslyn, and a third from atop the Kennedy Center.27 The piece almost didn’t happen. Organized and curated by Jocelyn Kress, the initial roster of artists consisted mostly of New Yorkers: not a single artist from DC was included. 14 artists wrote a public letter protesting the event, Gilliam, Krebs, and Gene Davis among the signatories.28 Soon 114 artists had signed a petition protesting the event — Gilliam, Krebs, and Davis were not among them, having become the only three DC artists included in the event.29 By one unsigned account, Krebs’ green beams of “Irish Light” were the “best thing in the show.”30
Laser projects were not without their drawbacks. Forgey reported a difficulty with one laser in Philadelphia, and another with a laser in Baltimore.31 Krebs was engaged throughout the mid-1970s with a particularly troublesome installation, in St. Petersburg, FL. With a $20,000 grant from the NEA, and another $25,000 from the city of St. Petersburg (passed by their city council on a 4-3 vote), Krebs designed a laser that would fire a mile across the city and over the Gulf of Mexico. By some reports, it could be seen 20 miles off shore, when conditions were right. One of those conditions was if the laser worked at all. On March 20, 1976, the night it was first scheduled to fire, a crowd of press and city officials gathered. Nothing happened. The day before, the laser had broken down. Krebs called the manufacturer on the west coast, and ordered replacement parts to be shipped overnight, but they got lost in transit somewhere in the Midwest. Once arrived and installed on March 21st, the laser again worked.32Haldemann stressed how sensitive lasers can be. They need a certain amount of electricity. Mirrors have to be clean. The gas source may run down. And equipment might overheat—which happened constantly in the humidity of St. Petersburg. As a result: lawsuits were threatened and filed. A city council candidate ran on the platform “No Laser,” and won.33
Difficulties with equipment didn’t dissuade Krebs from continuing with laser projects, or from cities commissioning them. In 1983 he would fire a 7-mile-long laser, entitled “The Green Hypotenuse,” from Mt. Wilson to the campus of CalTech in Pasadena. And in 1980, he made “The Source” as a part of the International Sculpture Conference. The piece consisted of a beam shot from the Lincoln Memorial that split, terminating into the Washington Monument and near the Capitol. A second beam fired from The Jefferson Memorial over the White House, and up 16th Street.34 Although not without complications, and occasionally breaking down,35 the piece continued through the 4th of July celebration.36 Considering the difficulties of the medium, it’s probably little wonder that Krebs’ practice expanded to include more prisms, and neon light. Both could be more stable, while still prone to problems.
In 1992, Krebs answered a Request for Qualification for a public art project in Shreveport, LA which called for sculpture on a stretch of Texas Street, and to illuminate the Long-Allen Bridge, a part of U.S. Route 80. One artist proposed light bulbs, another a big hoop. Identifying that the bridge traversed the Red River, Krebs proposed bathing the bridge in red neon, and he was awarded the commission.37
Pam Atchison, Executive Director of the Shreveport Regional Arts Council, recalled Krebs’ work ethic. For the better part of nine months, over the span of a year, “he was on that bridge every day: from sun up to sun down. He had a really small team. He didn’t direct; he installed himself.”38
The artwork installed across the bridge was illuminated December 31, 1993, and according to Atchison, the art is acknowledged for sparking redevelopment within the waterfront areas on either side of the bridge in Shreveport and Bossier City. The development also caused issues for the public artwork. Dust from traffic and construction clogged spot lights on either end of the bridge, causing maintenance issues that resulted in that component getting turned off. Neon installed the under the bridge was accidentally turned off on the Bossier side of the installation, and they couldn’t figure out how to turn it back on. It also had a laser component on top; like previous lasers, it kept breaking down. One element of the laser blew-up on several occasions, requiring replacement at extreme cost. In the mid-1990s, Shreveport completed a cityscaping project, causing street lights on 25-foot wooden poles to be replaced with much shorter antique-looking street lights. The old poles held the mirrors that redirected the laser beam from the bridge along Texas Street, and as a consequence, the laser element was shut down.39
The Neon bridge elements were maintained with a 15-year contract, but cuts to the state budget resulted in cross-the-board cuts to maintenance contracts, and the company holding the bridge contract folded within 18 months. One-by-one, pieces of neon began to fail along the bridge. By 2015, with few pieces of neon working, the city of Shreveport pulled the last plug. A campaign to replace the neon tubes with LEDs—similar to the effort to re-illuminate Krebs’ “Miami Line”, which suffered a similar fate to its neon—is underway.40
Even though longtime studiomates, the public works of Gilliam and Krebs have little in common in terms of media, form, or scale. Where these two DC artists succeeded was finding a means to express their craft to expand the visual impact of a location.
While creating public works of art was not a get-rich-quick scheme, for Gilliam and Krebs it was an important part of how they made their livings as artists. Despite positive reviews, neither artist made a lot of money from early-career sales. However, since each artist possessed a clear direction and vision within their works, what they lacked in sales they made up for in grant and foundation awards. Gilliam worked between gallery exhibitions and public installations. After the Jefferson Place Gallery closed, Krebs focused primarily on public art works.
Though works of public art may fall into disrepair, or require cleaning and conservation (including Gilliam’s work41), the lifespan of a work does not ultimately determine its value. The success comes from its presence in the public space, and the opportunity for hundreds or thousands of people to interact with the work on a daily basis. It enriches the environment, and as the work in Shreveport attests, enriches a community.
Footnotes
1 Getlein, Frank. “Gallery of Modern Art Opens Finest Exhibition.” The Washington Star 22
Sept. 1963: F-5
2 Forgey, Benjamin. “Tom Bostelle Show at Bader’s.” The Washington Star 20 Nov. 1966:
D-3
3 Forgey, Benjamin. “Sam Gilliam Bursts Forth at Phillips.” The Washington Star 22 Oct.
1967: D-3
4 Forgey, Benjamin. “ART: Jefferson Place Celebrates Its 10th Anniversary” The
Washington Star 21 July 1968: D-3
5 Ibid
6 Forgey, Benjamin. “High Quality Sculpture.” The Washington Star 5 Feb. 1967: D-3
7 Richard, Paul. “HemisFair Sculpture.” The Washington Post 31 March 1968. D6
8 Haldemann, Paul. Telephone interview. 10 June 2018
9 Forgey, Benjamin. “ART: Light Sculpture, Etchings and a Lively Group.” The Washington
Star 11 Aug. 1968: F-3
10 George, Hardy S. Breaking the Mold. Oklahoma City Museum of Art, 2007, p. 116
11 Cohen, Jean Lawlor, et al. Washington Art Matters: Art Life in the Capital 1940-1990.
Washington, DC: Washington Arts Museum, 2013, p.65 and Forgey, Benjamin. “The Third Wave.” Sunday Magazine, The Washington Star 12 Oct. 1969: Sunday Magazine pg. 9
12 Richard, Paul. “Corcoran’s Stunning Show.” The Washington Post 4 Oct. 1969: F-1, F-5
13 Felshin, Nina. “Re: Third Wave Question.” Received by John Anderson, 12 June 2018
14 Richard, Paul. “A Local Exhibition With International Appeal: in the Tradition of
Washington’s Color Painters.” The Washington Post 9 Nov. 1969: F-1, F-6
15 “Art” by Carroll Greene Jr, The Washington Post, Times Herald, Jan 26, 1969, pg G6
16 Spurlock, Steven. Telephone interview. 15 March 2018
17 “City Puts Subway Art on the Line.” The Harvard Crimson 4 March 1986: Retrieved
June, 12 2018 https://www.thecrimson.com/article/1986/3/4/city-puts-subway-art-on-the/
18 Binstock, Jonathan P. Sam Gilliam: A Retrospective. Berkeley, CA: University of
California Press, 2005.
19 Spurlock, Steven. Telephone interview. 22 March 2018
20 Ibid
21 Ibid
22 Haldemann, Paul. Telephone interview. 18 March 2018
23 Felshin, Nina. “Rockne Krebs: Three Works.” Art International May 1974.
24 Beale, Betty. “Muna’s Money.” The Washington Star 25 Oct. 1972: E-5
25 Forgey, Benjamin. “A Spectacle of Light.” The Washington Star 14 May 1973: D-1
26 Haldemann, Paul. Telephone interview. 18 March 2018
27 Forgey, Benjamin. “What An Art Show Is, Is Not and Can Be….” The Washington Star 29
May 1974: E-2
28 Forgey, Benjamin. “Ars Gratia N.Y. Artists?” The Washington Star 21 Feb. 1974: B-1
29 Forgey, Benjamin. “Protests Put a Dimple in Art Now ‘74” The Washington Star 10 May
1974: E-1
30 McLellan, Diana. “Avant Garde Being Seen in Three Rings” The Washington Star 30
May 1974: C-2
31 Forgey, Benjamin. “Last Chance to See Artist’s Laser Sculpture in Baltimore.” The
Washington Star 8 Jan 1978: E-4
32 Forgey, Benjamin. “The Artist in a Florida Storm” The Washington Star 7 Aug 1977: G-1,
20, 21
33 Ibid
34 Forgey, Benjamin. “A Summer Sculpture Place.” The Washington Star 3 June 1980: D1,
D2
35 Forgey, Benjamin. “A Compliment to Cityscape.” The Washington Star 28 June 1980:
B1, B-5
36 Crosby, Thomas. “A Standing Ovation for Grucci’s Rockets.” The Washington Star 5 July
1980: A-1,A-4
37 Atchison, Pam. Telephone interview. 14 June 2018.
38 Ibid
39 Ibid
40 Ibid
41 Squires, James. “Contemporary Artworks in an Atlanta Courthouse.” Art Conservator 2.2
(2007): 12-13