Artist of the day: Artist of the day, April 20-21: Joe Mangrum, American installation and multiple-medium artist

Saturday, April 20, 2019

Artist of the day, April 20-21: Joe Mangrum, American installation and multiple-medium artist

Joe Mangrum (1969) is an installation and multiple-medium artist who is particularly known for his large-scale colored sand paintings. Using a wide spectrum of components, his work often includes organic materials, such as flowers, food and sand, in addition to deconstructed computer parts, auto-parts and a multitude of found and collected objects. His installations often include mandala-like forms, pyramids, maps, grids and mushroom clouds and the Ouroboros.

Joe Mangrum started taking oil painting lessons when he was 8. At age 16 he won a trip to India, in an art competition sponsored by the Asia Society. His entry in the contest was a painting which portrayed a series of baskets representing his limited knowledge of India. The trip sparked an interest in travel and multicultural influences. Mangrum attended The School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) and received his Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in 1991. His focus of study was on painting and photography, though after art school he began to expand his work into site-specific, environmental and ephemeral installations.

After graduating from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Mangrum traveled for over four years in Europe and throughout the United States. Eventually he settled in Laguna Beach, California and began to arrange floral and natural materials into installations in public spaces. These often, circular forms have been called mandalas, though Mangrum has more recently chosen to describe them as biomorphic or organic installations. His first installations in Laguna Beach stemmed from a desire to draw attention to the impending San Joaquin Hills Toll Road (California State Route 73) in 1994. The road would divide one of the last major open green spaces in Orange County, California. His newly found activism propelled his determination to examine environmental issues in the forum of public art. He began to create organic forms at Main Beach Park, a public space in Laguna Beach. His art work was swept up by the Parks Department, so he continued to create new pieces and they were relentlessly swept up again. This resulted in a visit to a city council meeting by Mangrum. The council demanded that he provide one million dollars worth of liability insurance. The story was picked up by the L.A. Times and thereby sparked further discussion about art, its expression and the right to protest. Mangrum was invited to produce his first solo show at San Francisco State University in 1995.

A second L.A. Times article in 1995 caught the eye of art gallerist, Daniel Arvizu, who invited Mangrum to install a solo show at his gallery in Santa Ana, California. Mangrum created an ephemeral installation inspired by Bosch’s “The Garden of Earthly Delights” using molasses (as a substitute for oil) and orange slices in an interpretation of observations of the oil industry and its environmental “purgatories” in Orange County.

Mangrum took up residence in San Francisco in the mid-1990s after many years of traveling and continued to make public art both spontaneously and commissioned projects by the city of San Francisco. He was commissioned for two permanent terrazzo artworks that can be found on opposite corners of Mission and 22nd streets in San Francisco. In addition, an ephemeral installation titled “ Trans-mission 98”, was created at Justin Herman Plaza. This temporary installation consisted of dismantling the artist’s car and arranging it as a cityscape with organic elements of sod in Justin Herman Plaza. A reporter from the San Francisco Chronicle hastily ran the license plate number of the car and wrote an article incorrectly stating that a deal had been struck between the city and Mangrum to exchange his commission fee for absolution of multiple parking tickets. The article was picked up by various papers and blogs including “News of the Weird.” This controversy resulted in Ralph Guggenheim, the chair of the visual arts committee at the Art Commission, clarifying in a letter to the editor that “...The San Francisco Art Commission did not, and does not cut deals with artists.

Mangrum continued to utilize organic elements such as wheatgrass, flowers and palm leaves with car parts, bullets, machine wheels, and sand in his large scale ephemeral installations. Mangrum also continued to produce three-dimensional installations at local galleries and festivals.

In 2008, Mangrum moved to New York. He had installed a solo show titled, “Impressions” at Chi Contemporary Gallery (now Causey Contemporary) in Brooklyn, 2006. This solo show marked the emergence of sand painting as a primary feature in his work. He produced a second solo show at Chi Contemporary in 2009, titled “Chrysalis Stage.”[22] Mangrum began his series of over 700 sand paintings in public spaces of New York City in 2009 and continues currently. The public is most likely to view these paintings periodically in Washington Square Park and Union Square, Manhattan. In 2010, he created a sand runway for designer Jen Kao during Fashion Week which landed him Vanity Fair as a cartoon.

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