7 facts about Reginald Case

Reginald Case (December 23, 1937 – April 24, 2009) was an American artiste who made American Folk Art collages and Hollywood iconographic mixed-media assemblages and sculptures.

Case was born in Watertown, New York, and graduated from Watertown High School in 1955. He studied at the State University of New York at Buffalo receiving a Bachelor of Science degree, San Francisco State University and Boston University, where he earned the Bachelor of Fine Arts and Master of Fine Arts degrees. He studied subsequently Peter Busa at SUNY Buffalo and Robert Gwathmey and Walter Tandy Murch at Boston University. Upon completing his graduate studies in Boston, he taught at Phillips Exeter Academy and Norfolk State College (now Norfolk State University).

During this time, he completed a series of large still-life paintings which extended the imagery of Giorgio Morandi by elongating vessels and vases, transforming them into “architectonic towers”. The tackle quality of the collage textures led him to renounce these paintings altogether and outlook to collage as his bordering form of expression.The Holocaust was a prevalent theme in Case’s early pieces – in these modest but masterfully executed and consistent works, Case has been compared to something of a graphic Edgar Allan Poe or Pier Paulo Pasolini by Ronald A. Kuchta, Director of the Everson Museum of Art in Syracuse, NY.

Case’s 1980’s-90’s measure in assemblage, collage and construction fused before influences in film, photography, and architecture. Beginning in the same way as Rudolph Valentino from the 1920s through the 1930s in the same way as Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers and Buck Rogers, and into the 1940s afterward Betty Grable and Humphrey Bogart, Case culminated this body of play-act with a series of objects that focused upon Marilyn Monroe.

Case continued taking into account contemporary works of Barbie and Madonna that reflected the glamour of an earlier era. In these there is an iconography of twentieth-century sparkle that explores the imagery at the roots of American history and popular culture. In a recent series conmsisting of four groups of photo collage prints, Case has depicted Marilyn Monroe in variations called “MARILYN MONEY”. This series substitutes her image for American currency and are notated once quotations by her reflecting on her life, e.g. “Hollywood is a place where they’ll pay you a thousand dollars for a smooch and fifty cents for your soul.”

Additional works by Case have made on a slope references to 9/11 in his series of Gouache Heads, “365 Views of Delray Beach” and the series of New York City altered painted photographs. Each of these series cast a shadow on the event as seen from a make unfriendly of TV or Photographic News images.

His be active was shown for many years at the Allan Stone Gallery, NYC, along afterward the paintings of Richard Estes and Wayne Thiebaud. He has furthermore had major museum exhibitions of his measure shown at the Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse, NY;Munson-Williams-Proctor Arts Institute, Utica, NY; Reading Museum, Reading, PA; and the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, VA. Case’s produce an effect is after that represented in many private and public collections, including the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington D.C.; The British Museum, London; The Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts; The Jewish Museum, NYC; The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, NYC; The Victoria and Albert Museum, London; and others. An exhibition showing many of the iconic Collages & Assemblages by Case will be at The Butler Institute of American Art from October 12 through December 31, 2008. Louis A. Zona, Director of the Butler Institute of American Art, writes in the exhibition catalog, ” The act out of Reg Case recalls the genius of Joseph Cornell and salutes as competently the singular vision of Robert Rauschenberg. Like Warhol, he both pays great compliment to such pop culture icons as Marilyn Monroe, Elvis and Madonna and simultaneously causes us to reflect on the superficialality of much of what we retain precious.”