RIP Keith Sonnier – (July 31, 1941-July 18, 2020)
Poet of Light & Neon, Keith Sonnier (Artnet obit)
“The difference with Keith is that he has a willingness to expose himself to experimentation that a lot of his peers lacked,” curator Jeffrey Grove, who worked on the artist’s seminal show “Until Today” at Parrish Museum, told Artnet News. “And that’s not a lack of rigor, that’s a confidence… a kind of quirky confidence that allowed him the freedom to expose himself to nontraditional materials that a lot of artists of his generation weren’t doing at the time.”(via Artnet)
Irish art org – Keith Sonnier Until Today
Inflated Workes 195-66 at the National Exemplar NY
Keith Sonnier (1941-2020, Mamou, Louisiana) was a Postminimalist, performance, video and light artist.[1] Sonnier was one of the first artists to use light in sculpture in the 1960s, and was been one of the most successful with this technique. Sonnier was a part of the Process Art Movement.(via wiki)
Keith Sonnier – 1969, Artforum
WAS BORN in Mamou, a French-and-English-speaking town in Louisiana. The unassimilated Frenchness of Sonnier’s background—he speaks with no Southern accent—partly made for an unregretted childhood, and one which was open to the arts; at least it was not hostile to personal eccentricity. His father ran an hardware and electrical supply store. At 12 he drove. He went to Mamou High between 1955 and 1959. Nothing deeply disrupted this Southern rural picture except when, at 15, he had an inkling that “there had to be something else.”