Fred Eversley: former NASA Engineer now Sculptor Harnessing Energy
Gone are the days when work on behalf of a corporate sponsor of Art Basel Miami Beach culminated at Miami’s hot spot Delano South Beach Bar, commingling with colleagues, collectors, artists and new friends. I did not sufficiently appreciate the experience at the time! But looking back....
After one of the fair’s VIP opening nights, while nursing a glass of Johnnie Walker Scotch whisky on ice, German Art Advisor Tom Wessel beckoned me: “Come here, you should meet this artist, a former NASA engineer. His sculpture is at the Miami airport; try to drive by it on your way back to New York.” Everything sounded possible. A disarmingly handsome African American man reached out to greet me. Did I hear NASA, like space? I was intrigued, curious and proud all at the same time – you can only imagine why, a conversation about his journey from NASA to creating sculptures ensued. He offered me a catalog of his work and we said our goodbyes. Over the years I would read about Mr. Eversley’s exhibitions and successes. Kudos, I thought.
Turns out I met Fred Eversley again in the VIP lounge of Art Basel Miami Beach in December 2019. I greeted him and he remembered me. We reminisced about being at the bar with Tom Wessel and I was proud to tell him that I had been at Swann Auction Galleries to witness the sale of an Elizabeth Catlett sculpture commanding six figures. In talking of sculptors when first we met, I remembered him asking had I heard of her and naming her as a friend. Catlett had passed since then. “Too bad she is not around to witness that sale.” A few silent moments passed, after which he said, “I am going to buy us two glasses of champagne, let’s drink to Elizabeth’s memory.” I agreed to make the bar run. Hello Ruinart Rose Champagne!
Fred Eversley was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1941. He attended Brooklyn Technical High School and then Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University), where he received a degree in Electrical Engineering. Postponing an opportunity to pursue medicine and bio-medical engineering, Eversley first went to Southern California to explore the exploding electronics and aerospace industry of the early 1960s.
Eversley’s artwork draws you in. Literally. It’s his distinctive parabolic shapes, concave, made of resin and full of energy. “At first glance, the sculptures of Fred Eversley appear to be simple geometric forms: discs, parabolas, and triangular wedges. However, on further inspection, their subtleties and mysteries are revealed. All the three-dimensional works operate according to the optical principles of physics that determine the properties of lenses and mirrors. Even entirely solid forms appear to melt away either at the edges or through their centers.”
“The parabola geometric shape is a perfect concentration of all forms of energy,” he says in an interview for this newsletter. “It creates a single focal point; it focuses light and it draws people in.” His early artwork revolved around this shape, and Eversley continues to use it, even in his large outdoor pieces, such as his sculpture for Miami’s International Airport.
The fascination with parabolas was key to his initial occupation as an aerospace engineer – following in the footsteps of his father – where Eversley used the parabolic shape to concentrate high acoustical energy in his work at Wyle Laboratories in California, working on NASA’s Gemini and Apollo spacecraft in the 1960s.
Ensconced with his then-girlfriend, an artist, in Venice Beach (far from his Brooklyn roots), he worked in engineering by day, and at night came home to be surrounded by Southern California’s Light and Space art movement. Plastics were just becoming everyday substances back then: Peter Alexander and John McCracken were using polyester resins to create a slick minimalism now identified with West Coast art. Eversley found himself in the mix, even advising artists such as Judy Chicago on how to resolve engineering problems.
Then a near-fatal car accident in 1967 catapulted him full time into the art world. “I was pushing my MG out of the Wyle parking lot, when it ran over me,” he recalls. “I was on crutches for months and on disability for a year… which actually meant I could devote myself to art full time.”
By 1969, he’d leased a Frank Gehry-designed studio in Venice Beach, formerly occupied by painter John Altoon. In his early days, he cut transparent cylinders infused with layers of violet, amber and blue, sliced at different angles to reflect luminous, sharp-edged shapes. This series of cast polyester parabolic sculptures continues to be created to the present.
When fellow artist Robert Rauschenberg advised him to find a gallery in New York to show his works, Eversley set out to do so, but was turned down by several galleries. Undeterred and unannounced, he went to the Whitney Museum of American Art where then-curator Marcia Tucker (a fellow West Village resident during Eversley’s time there in the 1950s) offered him a one-man show.
In 1971, Eversley attended the debut of Art Basel where he found galleries in Paris, London, Madrid and Milan happy to show his works. From 1975 – 1980 he worked primarily in Washington, DC at the National Air and Space Museum, which selected him as their first artist-in-residence in 1977, a post that lasted three years. During this period, he created several series of works consisting of laminated plastic triangles in a series of geometric shapes: some wall-mounted arcs, some free-hanging spirals, some pedestal arches and some flat layered mounted sculptures.
It has been an upward trajectory ever since. Eversley’s work has often been cited as an important staple of the LA Light and Space Movement, and was included in the acclaimed Southern California art retrospective “Pacific Standard Time.” He has had numerous solo exhibitions nationally and internationally at Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, Waltham, MA; David Richard Gallery, Santa Fe; Quandro Gallery, Dubai, UAE; Oakland Museum of Art, CA; Eve Cohon Gallery, Chicago; and the European Space Agency Gallery, The Hague, Netherlands, to name a few.\
Eversley’s artworks are in the permanent collections of about three dozen museums, among them: the Whitney Museum of American Art, NYC; the Guggenheim Museum, NYC; the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum, DC; the Museum of Modern Art, NYC; the Museum of Fine Arts Houston; the Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection, Switzerland; and the National Academy of Science, DC.
Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) purchased their first Eversley sculpture recently, and a selection of his works from the ’60s through the ’80s was presented at Frieze in New York last year. His work was also featured in the US tour of “Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power 1963-1983.”
Fast-forward to Spring 2019: a solo exhibit, “Chromospheres,” at David Kordansky Gallery in LA, featured a series of complex, multicolor, multilayered sculptures, among the last to be created in his Venice Beach studio. These lenses – a complicated execution combining three- and two-color layered sculptures – combining Eversley’s past and present, are a synthesis of his technical prowess, with his artistic vision and decades of experience.
Currently working full time again in his SoHo studio in NYC, after being evicted by gentrification from his now historically-certified Venice Beach studio, Eversley is exploring different areas. A series of lithographs and a large-scale photographic printing process, as well as sculpture, are in the mix. “It’s too early to tell how it will turn out,” he says.
But, like everything else Eversley has done, this series is destined to envelop us in its energy.
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Acknowledgements:
Interview segment by Shellie Karabell, Journalist
Ellie Meek Tweedy, Editor
Visual Credits:
1. Fred Eversley next to Opaque Lenses, 1971
2 . Chromosphere
3. Convex, 2000
4. Apollo, Florence Italy, Bronze Commissioned by Cyrus Katzen for Katzen Center for the Arts Washington DC, 2004