Red Grooms’ first major artistic breakthrough was Ruckus Manhattan, a 1976 installation at New York’s Marlborough Gallery that cemented his reputation while elevating the gallery’s profile. Now 88, Grooms has returned to his native Tennessee, where David Lusk Gallery has assumed his representation following Marlborough’s closure earlier this year. The timing feels apt: As the Brooklyn Museum revisits Ruckus Manhattan in Excerpts From “Ruckus Manhattan,” Lusk celebrates the artist’s enduring local legacy with an exhibition devoted to Tennessee Fox Trot Carousel, the beloved work that endeared him to his home state.
For the Lusk exhibition, Grooms assembled a handful of the city’s best artists — Herb Williams, Jodi Hays and Ellie Caudill among them — to create a wild site-specific wall painting that captures the ebullience of Grooms’ singular style. The Scene spoke to Grooms via phone as he sat at the gallery overlooking the crew of painters, merrily directing them to create new versions of the horses, piano players, spitting dragons and more that populated his iconic carousel.
You’ve had a long career, and you’re still sharing your vision with other artists who are coming up behind you.
Nashville is great. I mean it’s really got so much talent, as everybody knows, and all the architecture in Nashville is really much more far-out than in New York, I can tell you. It’s going strong.
Red Grooms
You’re such an important figure in Nashville, and the carousel is so beloved. What has the experience of returning to it been like?
This really is the first time I’ve been really connected to Nashville artists in a long time. I told David [Lusk] that we’ve got to keep them together, because we could win the Super Bowl with this group.
Tennessee has in its possession a monumental multimillion-dollar piece of art and source of amusement and learning. And Tennessee keeps it in …
It’s a new generation, and it’s a generation that’s past the carousel, which started in ’98 and closed in 2003. But actually, now, it’s almost more fun than when it was here, because you can kind of imagine what its ephemeral life is. It’s been in storage here, so maybe it still exists in a fading imagination.
It’s such an exciting project. It feels like a big deal.
Actually, I’m feeling like it’s Nashville that’s the big deal. I’m glad to be here. You know, it connects right up to New York, it’s just as vibrant. Only here it’s even better, because it’s smaller.
We’re having a lot of fun, and I have a great team. We’re calling ourselves the Ruckus Tennessee team, and they’re wonderful painters. We’re just really pulling it together out of nowhere, really, and it’s great. It’s hard to know who’s actually at the helm here.
