32 Facts About Bruce Conner

Bruce Conner was an American artist who worked with assemblage, film, drawing, sculpture, painting, collage, and photography.

Bruce Conner was born November 18,1933 in McPherson, Kansas.

Bruce Conner worked in a variety of media from an early age.

In 1955, Bruce Conner studied for six months at Brooklyn Museum Art School on a scholarship.

Bruce Conner first attracted widespread attention with his moody, nylon-shrouded assemblages, complex amalgams of found objects such as women's stockings, bicycle wheels, broken dolls, fur, fringe, costume jewelry, and candles, often combined with collaged or painted surfaces.

Bruce Conner explicitly titled his movies in all capital letters.

Bruce Conner skillfully re-edited that footage, set the visuals to a recording of Ottorino Respighi's Pines of Rome, and created an entertaining and thought-provoking 12-minute film, that while non-narrative has things to say about the experience of watching a movie and the human condition.

Bruce Conner subsequently made nearly two dozen mostly non-narrative experimental films.

In 1959, Bruce Conner founded what he called the Rat Bastard Protective Association.

Bruce Conner coined the name as a play on 'Scavengers Protective Society'.

Later that year Conner had the first exhibition at the Batman Gallery, in San Francisco; Ernest Burden, owner and designer of the Designer's Gallery in San Francisco assisted Conner and the Batman owners and had the entire gallery painted black, similar to the last show at the Designer's Gallery to showcase Bruce's work, and the show received very favorable reviews locally.

Bruce Conner filmed the television coverage of the event and edited and re-edited the footage with stock footage into another meditation on violence which he titled Report.

In 1964, Bruce Conner had a show at the Batman Gallery in San Francisco that lasted just three days, with Bruce Conner never leaving the gallery.

Also that year, Bruce Conner decided he would no longer make assemblages, even though it was precisely such work that had brought him the most attention.

Many send-ups of artistic authorship followed, including a five-page piece Bruce Conner had published in a major art publication in which Bruce Conner's making of a peanut butter, banana, bacon, lettuce, and Swiss cheese sandwich was reported step-by-step in great detail, with numerous photographs, as though it were a work of art.

Just before Bruce Conner moved to Mexico in 1961, he repainted a worn sign on a road surface so that it read "Love".

Bruce Conner produced work in a variety of forms from the 1960s forward.

Bruce Conner was an active force in the San Francisco counterculture of the mid-1960s as a collaborator in light shows at the legendary Family Dog at the Avalon Ballroom.

One of Bruce Conner's drawings was used on the cover of the August, 1967 issue of the San Francisco Oracle.

Bruce Conner made collages made from 19th-century engraving images, which he first exhibited as The Dennis Hopper One Man Show.

Bruce Conner made a number of short films in the mid-1960s in addition to Report and Vivian.

Bruce Conner would pose in front of large pieces of photo paper, which after being exposed to light and then developed produced images of Bruce Conner's body in white against a dark background.

Bruce Conner announced his retirement at the time of the "2000 BC" exhibition, but in fact continued to make art until shortly before his death.

Bruce Conner used computer-based graphics programs to translate older engraving collages into large-sized woven tapestries, and made paper-based prints in that way as well.

Bruce Conner in late 2007 directed and approved an outdoor installation of a large painting, resulting in what one observer suggested is a final work-in-progress.

Bruce Conner was among the first to use pop music for film soundtracks.

Bruce Conner's films are now considered to be the precursors of the music video genre.

Bruce Conner continued to work on editioned prints and tapestries during the last 10 years of his life.

Bruce Conner, who had twice announced his own death as a conceptual art event or prank, died on July 7,2008, and was survived by his wife, American artist Jean Sandstedt Bruce Conner, and his son, Robert.

The Bruce Conner papers are held by the Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley.

In July 2016, It's All True, a career-spanning retrospective of Bruce Conner's work co-organized by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and New York's Museum of Modern Art, opened at the latter institution.

Bruce Conner called it "the best art museum exhibition of 2016, brilliantly unraveling the complex and conflicting personae of the Bay Area's most important all-around artist".