Robert Cumming was born in Massachusetts in 1943. In his early sculptural practice he built illogical yet utilitarian-looking things that were intentionally devoid of utility. He also engaged in mail art, shipping tree branches and dry-cleaning tissue, as well as home-made and store-bought postcards, to friends and strangers alike, near and far. In 1970, Cumming moved to Southern California to seek new exposure within the burgeoning art world around Los Angeles. There, he began to focus on photography, building elaborate tableaux that he shot with exquisite detail with an 8-by-10 camera
His work has been widely exhibited internationally. The most recent museum survey of his photography, Robert Cumming: The Secret Life of Objects, opened at the George Eastman Museum and traveled to the California Museum of Photography, UC Riverside in 2019–2020. Other solo exhibitions include Cone of Vision, traveled to Australia and the United States to MFA, Boston, the CAM, Houston, and the MCA, San Diego, as well as over seventy additional solo shows including the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C; Whitey Museum of American Art, New York, NY; and The MoMA, New York, NY. He received three National Endowment for the Arts Grants (1972, 1975, 1979) and a Guggenheim Fellowship (1981). Cumming’s archive will be placed at Stanford University, CA.
