Organic Design

HERB GREENE, ninety-two, is one of the great elder statesmen at the intersection of American art and architecture. With this in mind, the Norman Arts Council in Norman, Oklahoma, is hosting a landmark exhibition at Mainsite Contemporary Art entitled Mapping the Mental Continuum: Herb Greene. The show marks the first-ever solo exhibition of Greene’s paintings in Oklahoma. The architect gained international acclaim for his iconic 1961 structure, Prairie House, located on the outskirts of Norman.

Prairie House established Greene—a New York State native and long-time resident of Berkeley, California—alongside his mentor and collaborator architect Bruce Goff as founders of “the American School” of architecture. Their organic approach to design, born out of the University of Oklahoma, was highly responsive to setting and landscape and embraced the use of a variety of building materials in nontraditional ways.

Mapping the Mental Continuum includes mixed-media works demonstrating Greene’s mastery of layering materials, imagery, and texture in an exploration of creative process he calls “collage thinking.” He describes collage thinking as “the controlled collision of seemingly unrelated pieces of information.” Greene once described the Prairie House in Norman as “a collage that could be inhabited.”

The arts council’s executive director, Erinn Gavaghan, describes the exhibition, catalog, and forthcoming documentary film about Greene’s life and work as an “opportunity to reflect on Greene’s significant legacy in the canon of American architecture.” Of Greene’s body of work on display at Mainsite, Gavaghan says, “There is so much historical, architectural, and philosophical depth to these two-dimensional works. His is a unique voice that grew out of the University of Oklahoma.”

Mapping the Mental Continuum: Herb Greene will be on view at Mainsite Contemporary Art in Norman, Oklahoma, through November 27, 2021. mainsitecontemporaryart.com