Marty GreenbaumPop Art Brut Collage Mixed Media Print, Painting, Burning, Tape, Marty Greenbaum, 1978-1979

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Marty Greenbaum (1934-2020)
''Brooklyn Local in Weege Wisconsin''
Lithograph, with hand-coloring, blind stitching, stitching, burning, tape collage and paint
with … Read more Marty Greenbaum (1934-2020)
''Brooklyn Local in Weege Wisconsin''
Lithograph, with hand-coloring, blind stitching, stitching, burning, tape collage and paint
with Jewish, Hasidic, Sleepy Moishy character.


Marty Greenbaum (1934-2020) was an American painter, mixed media assemblage and book artist.
Greenbaum is best known for his mixed media assemblage, painting and artist books. Greenbaum appeared in three films: Hallelujah the Hills in 1963 by Adolfas Mekas, Life Dances On, in 1980 by Robert Frank, and The Present in 1996 by Robert Frank. Between 1962 and 1965 he took part in happenings by Allan Kaprow and experimental dance by Yvonne Rainer. Greenbaum authored his own happenings, i.e. Coney Island Carny, including artists such as Eddie Barton, Remy Charlip, Paul Kaplow, Paul Krasner, Al Hanson, Ed Blair, Allen Ginsberg, John Hammond, Eddie Rabkin, Lou Gossett, Renee Renee, Allan Kaprow, Phyllis Yampolsky, Thomas Hoving, Jackie Ferrara, Peter Schumann, Jim Bell, Bill Marshall, Corla Lopez, Bruce Waite, and Mark di Suvero, as well as organizing the Hall of Issues with Phyllis Yampolsky at The Judson Memorial Church.
Greenbaum had several teaching positions in the New York City public school system and was a member of the Creative Artists Public Service program twice, he also participated in various exhibitions with book objects. His work is in several public collections including The Art Institute of Chicago, Artists' Books, The Brooklyn Museum Collection, The Chrysler Museum, Norfolk, VA, Citibank, NYC, Colgate University, Hamilton, NY, Jacksonville Art Museum, Jacksonville, FL, Madison Art Center, Madison, WI, SUNY at New Paltz, NY and more.
Books as Objects
"Greenbaum, an early conceptualist, burned books in the 1960s, exhibiting the remains as 'corpses.' Today, he makes fetishistic notebooks filled with colored paper and scribbled equations, accretions of feathers and Rhoplex."
"Marty Greenbaum and Barton Lidice Benes destroy texts to create sculpture: Benes 'Bound Book,' a literal rope and wax imprisonment, and Greenbaum's 'Cutting Up,' a mixed media paste over of muted colors." Some of his most notable artist books include: "Batman" 1963-67, "In '84 Returned in 2004". Two stories about Marty from James Pernotto: we met at William Weege print shop in 1974 when he drove out from NYC with Alan Shields and Paco Grande and I was a lithography printer hired to work with them. Alan recalled on the trip out that Marty was working on his altered books and putting airplane glue on the pages and lighting it with a match. Enough said. I printed for Marty.

Solo exhibitions
2007 Two Artists, Windsor Whip Works, Windsor NY
2001 Pacifico Fine Art, NYC
1972, 1979, 1985 Allan Stone Gallery, NYC
1977 Picker Art Gallery, Colgate University, Hamilton NY
1963, 1964, 1965 Stryke Gallery, NYC

Group and Traveling exhibitions
2019 One Plus One Equals Three, curated by Roger Winter, Kirk Hopper Fine Art, Dallas, TX
Collage and assemblage by Romare Bearden, Roy Fridge, Marty Greenbaum, David McManaway, Robin Ragin, Nancy Willis Smith, and Roger Winter.
2017 Sorcery & Craft, Allan Stone Projects, New York, NY
2008 8 Artists 8 Books, 5 + 5 Gallery, Brooklyn, NY
1999 Talent, Allan Stone Gallery, New York, NY
1998 Artist Books, Bound & Unbound Gallery, New York, NY
1992 Fetishism, Allan Stone Gallery, New York, NY
Salon of the Book, Caroline Corre, Paris, France; Artists; Books, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France
1979 "Book Makers: Center for Book Arts First Five Years", Arthur A. Houghton, Jr. Gallery, The Cooper Union, NYC
1978 The Detective Show MoMA, PS1, Queens, NY (with Richard Artschwager and Gordon Matta Clark and others)
1978 Artists' Books U.S.A., traveling exhibition curated by Peter Frank and Martha Wilson
1977 Metamorphosis of the Book, documenta 6, Kassel, Germany; Book Objects, Albright-Knox Gallery, Buffalo, NY
1976 Forty Years of American Collage, Buecker & Harpsichords, New York, NY; The Book as Art, Fendrich Gallery, Washington, D.C.; The Object as Poet, National Collection of Fine Arts, Washington, D.C.
1975 Artists Make Toys, The Clocktower, New York, NY (Red Grooms, Alan Shields, Robert Kushner and more)
1970 Fur & Feathers, Museum of Contemporary Crafts, New York, NY; Personal Torment/ Human Concern, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY
1968 "Destruction Art," Finch College Museum of Art, New York, NY
1965 "Objects, by Dorothea Baer, Jackie Ferrara, Marty Greenbaum, Lulu, Carolee Schneemann, Van Bovenkamp Gallery, New York,
1961 Hall of Issues, Judson Memorial Church, New York, NY, (Claes Oldenburg, Phyllis Yampolsky and Jim Dine).

Awards
1983 The Institute for Arts & Urban Resources, NYC
1976 MacDowell Fellowship
1975 CAPS Creative Artists Public Service, New York State
1974 National Endowment for the Arts
1968 Lannan Foundation, Chicago, IL



The 10th Street Galleries were close to the Bowery, which in those days was inhabited by the homeless who came to the openings for the wine. They were never turned away. The openings were like a big party every Friday night, open to all. In the 1960s before the real estate prices made it impossible to live as a poor artist in New York City, a group of artists might meet at Katz delicatessen on the Lower East Side before wandering over to the openings. There was a feeling of excitement, freedom and a sense that anything could happen.
Ed McCormack described Marty’s work in an exhibition essay for Pacifico Fine Art in 2001: “At a time when most of his contemporaries were calculating how to harden their edges or revamp their styles with the window dressings of Camp, this primal mixed media wizkid from Coney Island labored like an entranced shaman, to conjure up zanily beautiful art brut paintings and weird, wax-drizzled voodoo alter assemblages that resembled nothing so much as the ritual artifacts of some lost psychedelic tribe!” On reading Marty’s narrative/bio we learn that he grew up in Coney Island where he worked summers in the Penny Arcades, and was inspired by the carnival atmosphere which he reflected in his work throughout his life. As expressed by David Bourdon of The Village Voice about a 1965 Stryke Exhibition: “Marty Greenbaum’s work is genuinely messy, crude and seemingly generated by a kind of infantile depravity. The show has the look of a sleazy midway at Coney Island …. It comes on as pathetic, trivial, and awful, and succeeds at being thoroughly enchanting.”
In the 1960s Marty was involved with the underground downtown NYC art scene. His bio also says his works were shown at The Whitney Museum, Smithsonian Institute of Art, as well as many galleries. The Allan Stone Gallery was one of his major collectors. See less