Trophy Fish
Celebrate Larry Fuente's birthday with his playful pop-art sculpture from our Renwick Gallery of American Craft.
Larry Fuente was born in Chicago in 1947. He studied briefly at the Kansas City Art Institute in 1967–68. He soon followed friends to California and eventually settled in Mendocino in northwest California, where he began to create sculptures whose surfaces are obsessively adorned with plastic beads and other mass-produced materials such as toys, game pieces, and buttons. The fanciful, colorful nature of this ornamentation has led Fuente to describe himself as a painter with a three-dimensional palette. His work playfully deconstructs the myths and fantasy of American consumer culture.
Source: National Museum of American Art (CD-ROM) (New York and Washington D.C.: MacMillan Digital in cooperation with the National Museum of American Art, 1996).
Pictured: Larry Fuente, born 1947, Game Fish, 1988, mixed media: wood, plastic, beads, buttons, poker chips, badminton birdies, ping pong balls, rhinestones, coins, dice, plastic figurines, combs, miniature pinball games, dominoes, chess pieces, pool balls, and other found objects, 51 1/2 x 112 1/2 x 10 3/4 in., Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of the James Renwick Alliance and museum purchase through the Smithsonian Institution Collections Acquisition Program.
Celebrate Larry Fuente's birthday with his playful pop-art sculpture from our Renwick Gallery of American Craft.
Larry Fuente was born in Chicago in 1947. He studied briefly at the Kansas City Art Institute in 1967–68. He soon followed friends to California and eventually settled in Mendocino in northwest California, where he began to create sculptures whose surfaces are obsessively adorned with plastic beads and other mass-produced materials such as toys, game pieces, and buttons. The fanciful, colorful nature of this ornamentation has led Fuente to describe himself as a painter with a three-dimensional palette. His work playfully deconstructs the myths and fantasy of American consumer culture.