Bruce Conner

Bruce Conner (November 18, 1933 – July 7, 2008) was an American artist who worked with assemblage, film, drawing, sculpture, painting, collage, and photography. Bruce Conner was born November 18, 1933 in McPherson, Kansas.His well-to-do middle-class family moved to Wichita, when Conner was four. He attended high school in Wichita, Kansas. Conner studied at Wichita University (now Wichita State University) and later at University of Nebraska, where he graduated in 1956 with a bachelor of fine arts degree. During this time as a student he visited New York City. Conner worked in a variety of media from an early age. In 1955, Conner studied for six months at Brooklyn Museum Art School on a scholarship. His first solo gallery show in New York City took place in 1956 and featured paintings. His first solo shows in San Francisco, in 1958 and 1959, featured paintings, drawings, prints, collages, assemblages, and sculpture. The Designer's Gallery in San Francisco held Bruce's third solo show. The gallery featured black panels which set off his drawings. One of his paintings, Venus, was displayed in the gallery window. The painting showed a nude inside a form representing a clam shell. A local policeman confronted the gallery owners to get it removed, "as children in the neighborhood might see the painting." The American Civil Liberties Union stood behind the gallery's right to display it, and the matter never became an issue. Conner first attracted widespread attention with his moody, nylon-shrouded assemblages, complex amalgams of found objects such as women's stockings, bicycle wheels, broken dolls, fur, fringe, costume jewelry, and candles, often combined with collaged or painted surfaces. Erotically charged and tinged with echoes of both the Surrealist tradition and of San Francisco's Victorian past, these works established Conner as a leading figure within the international assemblage "movement." Generally, these works do not have precise meanings, but some of them suggest what Conner saw as the discarded beauty of modern America, the deforming impact of society on the individual, violence against women, and consumerism.