CalArts alum B. Wurtz (Art MFA 80) was recently profiled in The New York Times Magazine feature “The Artist Whose Muse Is the Hardware Store.” The article follows the artist’s five-decade career using humble, everyday materials—plastic bags, aluminum pans—and turning them into something beautiful.
At 77, Wurtz continues to make art from his home on New York’s Lower East Side, where he assembles sculptures from objects such as buttons, screws, blocks of wood, clothespins, and yogurt containers. His Bunch #2 (1995), an eight-foot-tall sculpture made with 41 plastic grocery bags, is among his most recognized works. As The Times noted, the piece and others like it “conjure unexpected grandeur” from materials that are “the most ordinary, overlooked things.”
Wurtz’s work is currently on view in B. Wurtz: 13 Works at Garth Greenan Gallery in Manhattan, through Dec. 13. Marking his 58th solo show, the exhibition features a selection of sculptures and prints made over the past seven years, many publicly shown for the first time. According to the gallery, Wurtz “transforms his humble materials—empty cans of tuna fish, discarded lengths of 2 x 4 lumber, plastic bags, cotton socks — into discrete formal arrangements of remarkable levity and sophistication.”
Born in Pasadena and raised in Santa Barbara, Wurtz studied at UC Berkeley before enrolling at CalArts. As The Times wrote, he “needed to go to a big city or to graduate school, so he picked the California Institute of the Arts, a hothouse for the avant-garde in Valencia, in part because the conceptualist John Baldessari taught there.”
Wurtz is also among the artists participating in 50 + 50: A Creative Century from Chouinard to CalArts, an artist-led scholarship endowment initiative commissioning limited-edition works by 50 CalArts and Chouinard alumni—including Baldessari, Barbara T. Smith, and Carrie Mae Weems—to support future generations of CalArts students.
