Bruce Helander
Road Runner (Beep, Beep)
Mixed Media Artwork Hand signed and dated
This is a unique work and is not numbered.
Frame: 31" X 21.25"
Image: 29.5" X 19.5"
This appears to be glitter and paint over a printed background on canvas.
Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner are a duo of cartoon characters from the Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies series of animated cartoons, first appearing in 1949. The characters were created for Warner Bros in 1948 by animation director Chuck Jones and writer Michael Maltese
Bruce Helander (1947 -) is an art critic, arts writer, curator and artist whose specialty is collage and assemblage. He has a master’s degree in painting from the prestigious Rhode Island School of Design, where he later became the Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs of the college. He is a former White House fellow of the National Endowment for the Arts and has won the South Florida Cultural Consortium fellowship for professional achievement in the visual arts. He is one of two 2014 inductees to the Florida Artists Hall of Fame, Florida’s most prestigious arts and culture honor (the other is musician Tom Petty).
Helander is the former Editor-in-Chief of The Art Economist magazine and recently exhibited his work at Georgia Scherman Projects (Toronto), Corzine Fine Art (Los Angeles), Peter Marcelle Gallery (Bridgehampton, New York), Cornell Museum of Art (Delray Beach), and ArtHouse 429 (West Palm Beach). Most currently, his work was shown by Arcature Fine Art at Art Miami and Art Miami New York/Pier 94 and by Tansey Contemporary at Art Wynwood. Helander had a retrospective of his collages and paintings for the Coral Springs Museum of Art, scheduled for 2017, and his collages are included in “Open This End,” a five-year traveling museum show of works from the celebrated Blake Byrne collection in Los Angeles, currently at the Nasher Museum of Art. It included Pop art and Conceptual Art, Minimalism, body-oriented performance art, the Pictures Generation, identity politics and psychologically-inflected figurative works. Andy Warhol, Ed Ruscha, John Baldessari, Cindy Sherman, Louise Lawler, Rita McBride, Bruce Helander, Marlene Dumas, Albert Oehlen, Glenn Ligon, Mark Bradford and more.
His work is in over fifty museum permanent collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum of Art, the Smithsonian Institution, the Montreal Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the White House and the Vatican in Rome. His collages have been the subjects of over one hundred exhibitions in North America and Europe, with reviews in leading magazines such as ARTnews and Art in America.
Helander's work is in numerous private collections, including actors Martin Mull and Dennis Hopper, musicians David Byrne and Jimmy Buffett and fashion designer Todd Oldham, as well as numerous corporate commissions.
Prominent artists who collect his work include Dale Chihuly, Robert Rauschenberg, James Rosenquist and Larry Rivers. Football great Dan Marino, Senator Howard Metzenbaum and author Tom Wolfe own Helander work.
City Link magazine called Bruce Helander "arguably the most recognized and successful collage artist in the country.". "If there was a Pulitzer Prize for collage, Helander would surely win it," observed Kenworth Moffett, the former director of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, in a feature article in the November 2001 issue of Gold Coast magazine.
His collages appear nationally in leading print media, including The New Yorker magazine. He was commissioned by the United Nations in August 1999 to design a first day postal cover design and limited edition print, which was presented in the General Assembly Building. He has produced prints for the Washington Opera, Ballet Florida and the Palm Beach and Boston Film Festivals.
He has written extensively on contemporary art and in 2007 Grassfield Press will publish a book, titled Fire & Ice, of one hundred of his favorite reviews. He writes a monthly columns in South Florida Times magazine.
Select Exhibitions
2013 Zadok Gallery, 20 Shades of Grey, Miami
2011 Dennis Hopper Estate Sale Exhibition, Christie’s,
2001 Bernice Steinbaum Gallery, A Painting Over the Sofa (that is not necessarily a painting), Miami, Florida
2001 Society of the Four Arts, 63rd Annual National Exhibition of Contemporary American Paintings, Palm Beach, Florida
2000 ArtWest Gallery, RISD on the Road—Printmaking 2000 Woods-Gerry Gallery, RISD on the Road—Printmaking & Photography, Providence, Rhode Island
1999 Armory Art Center, Figurative Small Works, West Rhode Island School of Design, Art in a Box, Providence, Rhode Island
1995 Norton Museum of Art, Group show, West Palm Beach, Florida
1995 Marisa del Re Gallery, Summer group show
1993 Philharmonic Center for Contemporary Art, Greetings From Florida, Naples, Florida (included Robert Rauschenberg, James Rosenquist, Larry Poons, Jules Olitski and Hanson)
1992 Museum of Art, Stars in Florida, Fort Lauderdale, Florida (curated by David Miller; included Larry Rivers, John Chamberlain, Richard Anuszkiewicz)
1991 O. K. Harris Works of Art, Centennial Biennial Invitational, New York, New York
1986 Diane Brown Gallery, RISD in New York, New York, New York (included Jedd Garet, Italo Scanga, Jim Sullivan, Dale Chihuly, Stuart Diamond, Heide Fasnacht)
1986 Forum Gallery, Collages, New York, New York (included Romare Bearden, Varujan Boghsian,
Buster Cleveland...