Sam Richardson

Sam Richardson (1934-2013) was born in Oakland, California, and aside from a brief stint in New York when he served as the art director of the American Craft Council and the Museum of Contemporary Craft, he lived and work in the Bay Area his entire life. He earned his BA and MFA from the California College of Arts and Crafts. His early work was primarily painting, but as he worked, he became increasingly interested in the surface of his canvases which led him to begin shaping and forming his painting supports in three dimensions. By the late 1960s he was constructing small-scale sculptures that led him to even larger environmental works. Richardson pioneered a new type of sculptural landscape, and although he embraced new themes and shifted directions many times during his career, much of his work focused on the unpeopled, anonymous landscapes of his imagination. Sam Richardson taught at San José State University for many years. His works are featured in many collections including the Dallas Museum of Fine Art, the Denver Art Museum, the Indianapolis Museum of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Pomer Institute of Fine Arts in Australia, the Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum, the National Museum of American Art in Washington DC, and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York.

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