Robert H. Cumming

Robert Cumming is an American artist and photographer who was born in Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1943. He earned a BFA from Massachusetts College of Art in Boston in 1965 and an MFA in 1967 at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His first teaching job was at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, where he became involved with mail art, an early conceptual art movement that conferred art status on items sent through the postal system. In 1970, Cumming moved to southern California to lecture on photography, and in 1974, he started teaching at the University of California, Los Angeles. In 1978, Cumming moved back to New England, where he continues to teach and make art.

Cumming has worked in painting, photography, printmaking, and sculpture. He is best known for his photographs of conceptual drawings and constructions, which can layer meanings within meanings, and reference both science and art history. The Dallas Museum of Art (Dallas, Texas), the Denver Art Museum (Denver, Colorado), The Contemporary Museum, Honolulu (Honolulu, Hawaii) and the Whitney Museum of American Art (New York City) are among the public collections holding works by Robert Cumming.

References

* Baltimore Museum of Art, "14 American photographers: Walker Evans, Robert Adams, Lewis Baltz, Paul Caponigro, William Christenberry, Linda Connor, Cosmos, Robert Cumming, William Eggleston, Lee Friedlander, John R. Gossage, Gary Hallman, Tod Papageorge, Garry Winogrand", Baltimore, Baltimore Museum of Art, 1975.
* MIT List Visual Arts Center, "Three on technology: New Photographs by Robert Cumming, Lee Friedlander, Jan Groover", Cambridge, Mass., MIT List Visual Arts Center, 1988.
* Turnbull, Betty, "Rooms, Roments Remembered, Robert Cumming, Michael Davis, Roland Reiss, Richard Turner, Bruce Williams", Newport Beach, Calif., Newport Harbor Art Museum, 1978.
* Yager, David, "Frames of reference, photographic paths: Zeke Berman, George Blakeley, Eileen Cowin, John Craig, Robert Cumming, Darryl Curran, Fred Endsley, William Larson, Bart Parker, Victor Schrager, the Starn twins", Baltimore, Visual Arts Dept., University of Maryland, Baltimore County, 1989.