The trajectory of Don Gummer’s career as a sculptor began in New York City in the late 1970s with his wall reliefs of painted wood, carefully layered geometric works exhibiting a strong architectural influence. Moving beyond wood to stone, bronze, stainless steel, aluminum, and glass as his primary materials, his artworks evolved into subtly inventive freestanding sculptures, often of monumental scale, that exhibit his unfailing attention to craftsmanship and detail. The Artist Book Foundation is delighted to announce the forthcoming publication of Don Gummer, a new monograph on the artist and his highly acclaimed body of work.
Gummer was born in Louisville, Kentucky, in 1946 and grew up in Indianapolis, Indiana, where he attended the Herron School of Art and Design at Indiana University. He subsequently received both a BFA and an MFA from Yale University’s School of Fine Arts. In a 2001 interview with Peter Plagens, American artist and art critic, Gummer described his interest in sculpture as “the recontextualization of natural phenomena, of unaltered things brought into aesthetic balance by choosing and placing.” Using balance, proportion, and his unique sense of harmony, the artist is able to make durable materials seem almost buoyant. Negative space becomes an intrinsic element in his work, imparting a sense that his exquisite, seemingly permanent forms are ultimately as fleeting as any of nature’s creations would be.
The artist’s works can be found in many public collections including the Butler Institute of American Art in Youngstown, Ohio; the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art in North Adams, Massachusetts; and Chase Manhattan Bank and Chemical Bank, both in New York City. He has received a number of awards from prestigious organizations such as the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, and he was Visiting Artist at the American Academy in Rome. Some of his most recent sculptures appeared around Indianapolis in conjunction with his 2016 exhibition, Back Home Again.

Peter Plagens is an artist, art critic, and novelist. From 1989 until 2003, he was the senior writer and art critic for Newsweek magazine. He has received fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the National Arts Journalism Program. He currently writes about art for the Wall Street Journal and ArtForum magazine. Linda Wolk-Simon is currently a visiting professor at the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University. She was the Frank and Clara Meditz Director and Chief Curator at Fairfield University Art Museum and was the Charles W. Engelhard Curator and Head of the Department of Drawings and Prints at the Morgan Library & Museum. John Yau is an American poet and critic. He currently teaches art history and criticism at Mason Gross School of Arts, Rutgers University.

Contents: 7
Artist’s Statement | Don Gummer: 9
Introduction | John Yau: 11
Elegant Energy | Peter Plagens: 19
Plates: Sculpture: 33
Don Gummer: Drawings and Sculpture | Linda Wolk-Simon: 183
Plates: Paintings, Drawings, and Wall Reliefs: 191
Acknowledgments: 261
Chronology: 263
Awards, Public Collections, and Public Commissions: 265
Selected Group and Solo Exhibitions: 267
Bibliography: 271
Photography Credits: 275
Index: 277
Copyright Page: 280

A sculptor of remarkable consistency—Gummer has been making art for 50years—he has three surprisingly distinct modes of working. The first is vertically, in which he finds a connection to nature that transcends the machine-made quality of a nearby work’s separate parts. “It needed to go up, through ‘clouds,’ then thinner clouds, in a kind of ascension,” he says of one work in his studio, then adds that the horizontal, metaphorical, metal stratocumuli “actually make the piece physically stronger. It’s tricky, like trying to build a tree up and around a house.” Gummer’s second mode is architectural, often incorporating floor plans in which the draftsman’s lines are rendered in slim lengths of wood or metal; such work is, however, usually installed vertically on a wall in what might be called geo-romantic relief. . . . The third mode, to employ a solecism, is more different. It employs in various ways poles, cables, and enough occupied ground underneath to imply—if not demand—commissions to be realized.
. . . What unites the various modes of Gummer’s work are drawing (in his case, the Modernist definition of sculpture as “drawing in space” applies in spades), integrity of materials (he never tries to make a sculptural ingredient look like something it isn’t), and an abiding love of, and respect for, Constructivism.