RICHARD NONAS
Studied literature and social anthropology at the University of Michigan, Lafayette College, Columbia University and the University of North Carolina. Prior to becoming a sculptor and over a period of ten years, Nonas conducted field-work on Native American sites within the United States, Mexico, and Canada. Nonas was a member of the “Anarchitecture” group along with Gordon Matta-Clark and Richard Serra during the 1970’s, when he began to develop his post-minimalist approach to sculpture. While he tends to work as a sculptor with natural materials such as stone and wood, it is space which is really his medium. Each work or installation is an attempt on his part to elicit affects related to disjunction, uncertainty, ambiguity, or doubt—all of which arise from his fundamental distrust of art that he considers inherent to art’s capacity to confront our expectations and habitual experiences through the re-fashioning of understanding. It is in this sense that he has been led to make statements such as “I physicalized doubt itself,” and “sculpture builds by erasing.” It seems fitting then that one of Nonas’ favorite quotes comes from Samuel Beckett’s Malloy: “To restore silence is the role of objects.”
His experiences as an anthropologist deeply imprinted upon his artistic practice, and he has noted that his interest in sculpture arose out of art’s ability to communicate across time, space, and personal experience, saying that “the essence of art has always, everywhere, been its unpredictability, its position just outside the usual range of experience and explanation.” Nonas has exhibited extensively across the globe, often producing permanent, site-specific installations on a large scale. His work was included in the 1973 Whitney Biennial, and he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship that same year. More recently, he has exhibited at the Art Institute of Chicago and in 2016 held a solo show at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary.