The late Richard Posner in a 2000 photograph. Born in Los Angeles in 1948, he traveled and exhibited his work internationally.
Artist Richard Posner and an as-yet-unidentified woman were found dead in his Tuscon, Arizona, apartment on Saturday, March 12th, victims of what police reports are calling an apparent murder-suicide. According to a report in the Arizona Daily Star newspaper, the Tucson police department stated that they have determined the woman shot Posner before turning the gun on herself. Posner was 62 years old.
After graduating with an MFA from the California College of the Arts in 1976, Posner embarked on a nearly four-decade long career he described on his resume as “self-employed independent public artist, architectural glass designer, ceramicist, environmental garden designer” that saw him receive four Fulbright fellowships, two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, and a Jackson Pollack-Lee Krasner Foundation fellowship. He participated in numerous group exhibitions in museums and galleries, including at the The Museum of Fine Arts Boston and the Musee des Arts Decoratifs in Paris. London’s Victoria and Albert Museum houses his work in their permanent collection, as do the Met and Corning. He was California-born, but truly a citizen of the world, as he and his art found a home in Germany, Sweden, the U.K., France, as well as the U.S.
Richard Posner's Mirrored Slat Image at the Seattle Veterans Administration Medical Center was a major public art project.
Posner, whose self- described modus operandi was “experiment endlessly and keep humble,” saw success as both a studio and public artist. Posner’s 1985 work in the lobby of the Seattle Veterans Administration Medical Center defines the 1,000 square foot main entry with textured glass blocks and features an image of a man pushing a plow with a woman behind sowing seeds. The image, made with mirrored slats and sporting a distinctly Asian feel, morphs into a sword-wielding solider marching off to an unknown destiny as the viewer passes by the panel. His museum and gallery works are similarly bold and undeniably beautiful. His 84-square-foot stained glass window, The Dream Chartres of Four Gone Conclusions (1978) on permanent display at San Francisco’s Exploratorium Museum is a beautiful example. It is as epic in scale as it is intricate in detail, and draws from influences as diverse as Surrealism and Edo-period Japanese art.
Detail of The Dream Chartres of Four Gone Conclusions, a 1978 installation at San Francisco's Exploratorium Museum.
For Posner the glass canvas was a, “greenhouse for my intuition,” and his tools were, “a clean slate, an open mind, and a sense of humor.” This approach is evident in everything from the titles of his works (“Another Look at My Beef with the Government,” and “Haiku for Maya Angelou” are two titles that are especially demonstrative of his unique wit) to the works themselves. Mohammed Speaks (1995) is a mold-blown glass boxing glove that comes complete with laces and the faded colors that come after years of sparring with a partner, even an imaginary one.
Richard Posner, Mohammed Speaks, 1995. Mold-blown glass boxing glove (Made with assistance of Robert Adamson, Lara McLaughlin, and Lon Clark at the Glass Eye Studio, Seattle). H 8, W 7, D 4 in.
Writing about Posner after his death, artist Buster Simpson notes that Richard, “believing wholeheartedly that art-making is a full-body baptismal immersion sport … was never in over his head.” Although the line between studio art and public art is a tricky one for some to straddle, it wasn’t for Richard Posner, says Simpson. “The words ‘public art’ are two sides of the same equation,” he explains. “It involves the pubic and art every time…that’s what keeps me honest, doing work that has currency in the art world and in larger world. One informs the other, they are not mutually exclusive.”
—Jason Gutierrez