HISTORY

Robert Beverly 
B. Seoul Korea
Lives in Los Angeles, CA

My father was an international security consultant who traveled throughout East Asia during the 70’s trading and selling art, textiles and gemstones.  In the early 80’s my family fled Korea as political refugees following the assassination of Park Chung-Hee. My mother, Ara Kim, was a student of theatre and would receive her MFA from Hunter College in New York.  She currently is a director and playwright in Seoul, and a professor of theatre at Sungkyunkwan University.  She is also the ambassador for Korean Theatre Arts for UNESCO.

My interest in the arts began at a young age as my father was a collector of Asian textiles, masks, pottery and sculpture and my step mother designed exhibitions for the natural history museum in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. They had a small gallery in the House on The Rock a sprawling Frank Lloyd Wright inspired labyrinth that housed the collection of Alex Jordan, an eccentric Wisconsin billionaire. I spent many years in this strange place as a child and then later as a high school student for summer work.

Later in life my father’s travels through eastern Europe led to an interest in modern and contemporary art from mainly Eastern-Bloc countries.  He opened a gallery for a brief period in the late 1980’s to showcase the art of a small group of contemporary Russian painters that hailed mainly from Moscow, St. Petersburg, and East Berlin.  I would accompany him on these trips occasionally and came to know a group of bohemian painters that took great risks to have their work shown outside their homeland as public exhibitions of their work were not allowed.  Most of them practiced a form of political realism or psychologically based Neo-expressionism.  Many of the works were of high quality, and due to their political nature would often need to be smuggled out of the countries of origin which my father would facilitate.  Many of this group have been jailed for their critical and at some points radical political views.

I was raised on a dairy farm in rural Wisconsin with my grandparents as my parents both worked internationally and traveled frequently.  Shortly after my high school graduation, I traveled to Australia to work with one of my father’s associates staking gold plots and prospecting in the Australian outback.   During this time I grew fond of Aboriginal arts and crafts and also picked up an old 35mm Leica with which I document my months in the outback and subsequent travels throughout Indonesia and Asia.

After a year of traveling I came back to the states to pursue my education.  I had become a proficient photographer and on a drive through the Southwest had met a young curator involved with an institution named the Center for Creative Photography.  After looking at some of my prints she offered me a job, and as my gold funds were running low it seemed wise to accept.  

This would begin my five year tenure at the Center for Creative Photography.   Established in 1975 and located on the University of Arizona (Tucson) campus, it is a research facility and archival repository containing the full archives of over sixty of the most famous American photographers including those of Edward Weston, Harry Callahan and Garry Winogrand, as well as a collection of over 90,000 images representing more than 2,000 photographers. The center also houses the archives for Ansel Adams, one of the Centers founders and someone whom I was destined to work posthumously for.   It currently houses all negatives known to exist at the time of his death and for several years I would spend of great deal of my time huddled over an enlarger attempting to make accurate copies of his negatives and prints for research purposes.  

My first year at the center I worked extensively on the publications of two monographs Ansel Adam's  At 100 and Gary Winogrand's 1964; two of the finest publications in print on these respective artists.  Shortly thereafter I found my way into the Center’s extensive darkroom.  I had come to run the photography departments darkroom also, and over the course of the first two years became a skilled darkroom technician.  While at the Center I was entrusted with a program to duplicate the negatives of Edward Weston and to make duplicate prints of Ansel Adam’s photographs using the original negatives to print from and the original prints as guides.  Ansel Adams was a relentless educator and it was his desire to make these materials available to students to work with hands on, a goal that was achieved by making duplicates of the originals.  This laborious and rewarding process would come to take up my last two years at the center and would perfect my technical printing skills to the level of master printer.

During my time at the Center I studied art history and studio art with an emphasis in photography and left with a major in both.  I enjoyed learning and being challenged by academics and would leave the school with a cumulative GPA of 4.0.  I was later accepted to Yale and UCLA for graduate studies.

My studies led me to my current position as a gallery director in Los Angeles. Through this position I have had the opportunity to learn the business side of art, and curate shows by internationally respected artists such as Ed Moses, Larry Poons, and Fred Eversley. 

MY STUDIO PRACTICE

Many of the earlier works take cues from my early photographic collages and I began using image transfers to create scenes on dyed papers.  The use of paper has always informed my practice, from chemically based printing papers used in the traditional silver gelatin darkroom, to papers dyed in tea and folded using techniques based on tie dying, Shabori fabric dying and paper marbling which was traditionally used in handmade books in the 18th and 19th centuries.  These techniques are coupled with more traditional methods of applying paint utilizing brushes, air brushes, and handmade trowels.   

The densely layered pieces often function in the intersection of abstract art and representational art and often have contain elements of politics and culture.  Paper is used throughout my process and is often folded, dyed, and marbled. I also use acrylics, image transfers, real butterflies and insects, and many other mediums in the work. I enjoy employing the use of many different types of mediums in a single work and experimentation and technology is used throughout my process.