In 2019, I was honored with the Herb Greene teaching fellowship at the University of Oklahoma. Since then, I have been part of the faculty and had a chance to visit Herb Greene’s legendary Prairie House just a few miles away from the campus. Herb Greene was a disciple of Bruce Goff while at OU and designed the Prairie House in 1961. You can see Goff’s influence on him, yet there is an abstract quality to Greene’s work that is not latent in Goff’s designs.
The Gallery Mainsite Contemporary Art in Norman, Oklahoma, shows Greene’s other collage painting talent. The Herb Greene Mapping the Mental Continuum exhibition is a well-curated show of his best paintings from the 1960s to today and architectural drawings with photographs of some of the houses he built. The paintings are emotional, the collage of images from newsprint or magazines is seamlessly applied to the composition, paint, and image are blurred. The exhibition catalog has an excellent essay by my collogue, Francesca Giani, and sells for a mere 15 dollars. The exhibit will run until November 27, 2021.
For more info, visit the gallery website: https://www.mainsitecontemporaryart.com/herb-greene-mapping-the-mental-continuum
