Octopus Initiative Artist Clark Richert
Clark Richert (1941−2021) was an American artist known for his brilliant, geometric paintings, and for his role as co-founder of the 1960s artist’s community, Drop City. Over a career that spanned 50-plus years, Richert grappled with “big ideas,” such as the structure of space, the meaning of time, the geometry of viewing, quasi-patterns, and the hidden unity of likenesses. Inspired by Mark Rothko’s use of color and Buckminster Fuller’s theories regarding the structure of the universe, Richert speculated about the nature of reality through paintings, animations, and prints. His work anticipated such mathematical and scientific breakthroughs as non-periodic tiling and quasi-crystals.
Born in Wichita, Kansas, Richert earned his BFA at University of Kansas in 1963, and his MFA from the University of Colorado in 1972. In 1966, he was co-recipient of the Dymaxion Award from Buckminster R. Fuller, and he was awarded a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in 1980. In the early eighties, Richert moved to Denver, where he began a teaching career that spanned three decades, earning him a reputation as a valued mentor and advocate among hundreds of students and peers. His work was featured in MCA Denver’s exhibition West of Center in 2011, and he was the subject of a retrospective exhibition, Clark Richert in hyperspace, at the museum in 2019. Richert’s work as a member of Drop City was featured in Hippie Modernism: The Struggle for Utopia, which was presented at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis. His work has also been shown at the Cranbrook Art Museum, Bloomfield Hills, MI; and the Berkeley Art Museum, Berkeley. His work can be found in the collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Wichita Art Museum, Kirkland Museum of Fine & Decorative Art, Denver Art Museum, the Kimpton Hotel Born, and the ART, a Hotel in Denver, among others.
