ROBERT CUMMING
RED CARPET

Exhibition: November 1 – December 15, 2013

Janet Borden, Inc. presents ROBERT CUMMING - RED CARPET, a wonderful new exhibition of his paparazzi pictures from the seventies.

Red Carpet Press Pass, by Robert Cumming

In the sixties, I put a couple hundred thousand miles on the odometer, driving across the U.S. The further west the new Interstates took you, the stranger the landscapes became. Beginning in Los Angeles in 1970, I started filling up slide drawers with categories of things peculiar to California and its neighbors to the north and south: mobile homes, palm trees and cactus, wall murals, buildings in the shape of ships and events like the Rose Parade, Las Floristas Headdress Ball and, of course, anything relating to Hollywood.

By devious means over the next few years, I managed to get a foot in that door, eventually getting that same foot on the red carpet, concluding with two Golden Globes and two Academy Award ceremonies. For a while, I showed mixes of these in slide lectures, before finally putting them to rest and eventually leaving California for New England.

Forty years later, awakening in a new millennium, the medium of the digital print is a better way of displaying this work. This exhibition is virtually the first showing of this work in print form, except for a single image (a Cibachrome print of Richard Burton) included in a portfolio with other California photographers.

ROBERT CUMMING was born in Worcester, Massachusetts in 1943. He currently lives in Whately, Massachusetts. His painting, sculpture and photographic work have all been widely exhibited since the early 1970s. He has received grants from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, 1980-1981; the National Endowment for the Arts, 1972, 1975, 1979. His photographs were shown in 1999 at The Museum of Modern Art in a solo exhibition, “The Clutter of Happenstance.” Among his many other solo exhibitions are: Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, DC; Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego; University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He is currently working on a book about nautical architecture.