Robert Hudson with Outrigger, 1984 Photo: Harvey Stein
It is with great sadness that we announce the passing of our dear friend and artist Robert Hudson on June 14, 2024, in Cotati, CA, at the age of 85.
Robert Hudson was born in Salt Lake City, on September 8, 1938 and later grew up in Richland, WA. In high school, Hudson met two of his most important lifelong friends, fellow artists William Allan and William T. Wiley (1937-2021). All three friends took art classes in high school from the noted painter, sculptor, poet, and writer James McGrath, who would alter the direction of the three artist’s lives. McGrath encouraged his young students to find inspiration in the land around them and he also exposed them to the arts and culture of the Native American tribes living nearby, treating it as equal to that of Western Art. Hudson, being the youngest of the three friends, graduated last and followed Allan and Wiley to the San Francisco Art Institute, where his star began to rise. Hudson would earn his BFA in 1961 and his MFA in 1963 from the Institute, but perhaps more importantly he was singled out for his first solo gallery exhibition of sculpture in 1961 at San Francisco’s legendary Batman Gallery. In this show and many afterwards, including Peter Selz’ landmark Funk exhibition at the Berkeley Art Museum in 1967 and his inclusion in four Whitney Annuals (1964, 1966, 1968, and 1970), Hudson garnered a national reputation for his welded steel sculptures made from assembled pieces of found metal and painted in bright abstract patterns.
In 1968, Hudson’s work took a dramatic turn. With the arrival of Minimalism and reductivist aesthetics in New York, Hudson's work began to develop in two directions – one being a group of monumentally scaled works and the other a series of more conceptually oriented sculptures – both of which employ a greatly reduced color palette. The resulting works also saw the introduction of non-ferrous materials such as glass, polymer clay, rubber, and wood, among others, as well as the inclusion of text in some pieces.
This short period of “minimal” work came to an end around the time Hudson made the fortuitous decision to join his friend and fellow artist, Richard Shaw, at his newly established Stinson Beach studio in fall of 1971. At that moment, Hudson was ready for a change in direction, and he hoped to find, in his words, “‘something that was equally satisfying and a lot friendlier’ than steel”.¹ He found it in the medium of porcelain clay, which Shaw, himself, was just beginning to explore.
Hudson’s approach to ceramics was much the same as his approach to steel – gathering together found objects from junk stores and the land around the studio, and assembling cast porcelain versions of them into elaborate sculptures unlike any seen before. The impact of their three-year collaboration from 1971-1974, re-invigorated Hudson and brought back the vibrant color palette that became his trademark. It also led Hudson to create his masterful series of “combine” works of the 1970s that sit in the space between paintings and sculptures, as well as an adjacent series of large-scale paintings.
By 1980, Hudson had begun making polychromed steel sculptures again, often on a monumental scale, while continuing to make paintings, combines, and drawings. In 1985, Hudson was the subject of a mid-career retrospective at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, which later travelled to the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, The Art Museum at Florida International University, and the Laguna Beach Museum of Art.
In the late 1990s, Hudson returned to porcelain and a renewed collaboration with Richard Shaw during a series of residency workshops at Philips Academy in Andover, MA. Notably different in these later clay works is Hudson’s attachment of actual found objects to the porcelain elements, adding an additional layer of assemblage to each composition. Hudson’s renewed explorations in porcelain continued alongside his work in steel, painting, and drawing well into the early 2000s. Also of special note from this period is a series of collaborative paintings Hudson made with this friends William Allan and William T. Wiley, which were featured in a 1998 exhibition at the Palm Springs Desert Museum. Hudson continued to produce sculptural works in steel and drawings until a few years before his death. These later works can be characterized as having more found objects and imagery in the compositions than he had used in previous series.
During his lifetime, Robert Hudson’s reputation in sculpture, painting, drawing, and ceramics earned him numerous awards, including the 1965 Nealie Sullivan Award at the San Francisco Art Institute; a 1972 Individual Arts Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts; a 1976 John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship; and the 2014 Lee Krasner Award in recognition of a lifetime of artistic achievement. He also received several prominent commissions, including for Tlingit, a public sculpture commission awarded by the United States General Services Administration for the Federal Courthouse in Anchorage, AK.
Robert Hudson’s sculptures, paintings, ceramics, and drawings have been exhibited extensively across the United States and abroad, and can be found in the collections of the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; The Museum of Modern Art, NY; Whitney Museum of American Art; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D. C.; Smithsonian American Art Museum; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Philadelphia Museum of Art; Buffalo AKG Art Museum; Art Institute of Chicago; Denver Art Museum; Honolulu Museum of Art; Yale University Art Gallery; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco; Crocker Art Museum; Oakland Museum of California; San Jose Museum of Art, CA; Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive; Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University; Anderson Collection at Stanford University, CA; Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem Museum of Art, University of California, Davis; and the di Rosa Center for Contemporary Art, Napa, CA, among many others.
Over the course of his career, Robert Hudson was represented by several prominent American dealers and galleries, including Hansen Fuller Gallery (later Fuller Goldeen Gallery, then Fuller Gross Gallery) in San Francisco, Allan Frumkin Gallery (later Frumkin Adams Gallery) in New York, Frank Lloyd Gallery in Los Angeles, and is currently represented by Brian Gross Fine Art (formerly of San Francisco, now Santa Fe).
Paul Thiebaud Gallery is honored to have given Robert Hudson his final exhibition during his lifetime, Robert Hudson: Ceramic Sculpture and Drawings 1970-2022, which was organized in association with Brian Gross Fine Art earlier this year.
Notes
¹ Interview with the artist by SFMOMA Curatorial Assistant Michael Schwager in February 1985, excerpted in the essay "Casting Illusions: The Ceramics of Robert Hudson," published as part of Robert Hudson: A Survey, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 1985, pg. 19.