Red Grooms, "Our First Brush With Red Grooms/ It Was Exciting!", 1968

Red Grooms

"Our First Brush With Red Grooms/ It Was Exciting!", 1968

Paint brush with paint inside acrylic casing

11 × 3 1/2 × 2 inches

This paint brush - with original paint - was Red Groom's first paint brush used to create the billboard, "Magic City of the West," for the Foster & Kleiser company on April, 1968.
(Foster & Kleiser was an American advertising company founded in 1901 that grew into the "West Coast's leading billboard company" - and became famous for its iconic billboards and collaborations with artists. In an Oral history interview with Red Grooms, 1974 Mar. 4-18, for the Smithsonian Archives of American Art, Red Grooms talked about the billboard he was commissioned to make for Foster and Kleiser. He said, "Now there was another project I did with Foster and Kleiser, the big billboard concern. I painted a big billboard in Chicago in 1968 [Magic City of the West], after I finished the Chicago piece, The Contemporary Art Museum, and really a guy by the name of Bernie Rogers—it was his brainchild to do this billboard. That was definitely a tie-in between the art community and this commercial concern, which needed the political clout to continue putting up the billboard because everybody was against eye pollution and stuff. Maybe more then than now. I don't know. It doesn't seem that anybody is talking about that so much now. But maybe they've gotten rid of the billboard... On LaSalle Street going close to the river. On the main thoroughfare there. It was up during the 1968 Democratic Convention. We had left so I don't really know what came of it..."

Perhaps, indeed, all that is left of the Magic City of the West is this memento the company created to celebrate its collaboration with Red Grooms.