Bruce Nauman: born in Fort Wayne, 1941

1941 - present

The fact: The largest reputation in this section rests on the shortest Fort Wayne record, and the leg prints it at its true size. Bruce Nauman was born in Fort Wayne, Indiana, on 6 December 1941. His father Calvin's work as an engineer for General Electric meant the family moved regularly, and Fort Wayne's part in the story ends at the beginning: the city is the first line of every museum biography of one of the most important living American artists, and almost nothing in the work that followed happened here. That is not a small thing. It is the same fact the Scott and Collias articles record at larger length, that the birthplace line is permanent, and in Nauman's case it runs in the Tate, in the Britannica, and in every retrospective catalog on earth.

The work: He studied mathematics, physics, and art at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, took his master's degree in fine art at the University of California, Davis, in 1966, and gave up painting for the mixture of sculpture, performance, film, video, and neon that made his name, the body used as material, language used as object. His first solo exhibition came in Los Angeles in 1966, his first retrospective at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Whitney in 1972, when he was thirty-one. The Tate's Turbine Hall commission, Raw Materials, came in 2004, the year of his Praemium Imperiale for sculpture; the Golden Lion at Venice came twice, in 1999 and 2009; the great retrospective, Disappearing Acts, filled the Museum of Modern Art in 2018-19. He has lived and worked in New Mexico since 1979, on a ranch at Galisteo since 1989.

The standing: Fort Wayne does not claim the work. It claims, on documents no one disputes, the start, and this section exists in part to say that a city record which omitted its most famous artistic son because he left as a child would be a record edited for comfort. He is printed here at biography length, neither inflated into a Fort Wayne artist in residence nor trimmed into a footnote, and the gap between the birth and everything after is left exactly as wide as it was.

Sources:

1. Tate, press release, "Bruce Nauman" (born in Fort Wayne, Indiana, in 1941; the Wisconsin and Davis studies; the 1966 first solo exhibition; the 1972 retrospective at thirty-one; the Golden Lions of 1999 and 2009; the Praemium Imperiale of 2004).
2. Encyclopaedia Britannica, "Bruce Nauman" (born in Fort Wayne, Indiana, on December 6, 1941; B.A. 1964; M.F.A. 1966).
3. Sperone Westwater, artist biography (born in Fort Wayne, Indiana, in 1941; Raw Materials at Tate Modern, 2004; Disappearing Acts at the Museum of Modern Art, 2018-19).
4. EBSCO Research Starters, "Bruce Nauman" (his father Calvin's engineering work for General Electric and the family's regular moves).