Nervous City Street Scene from Ten Lithographs by Ten Artists

Red Grooms

1971

A color lithograph in which Red Grooms packs a city street with cartoonish, overdrawn figures, signage, and gesture to satirize the sensory overload and social friction of urban life.

The work assaults the eye with a claustrophobic, carnival-like tangle of flat, bright color, nervous ink outlines, and grotesquely exaggerated faces and hands that collide like a visual shout.

Emerging from Grooms’s Pop- and Happenings-inflected practice, this print translates his theatrical, installation-based humor into a widely reproducible format, helping to blur the boundaries between fine art and popular, streetwise imagery and expanding printmaking’s narrative and performative possibilities.

Palette

Art Terms

Lithography Print Pop art Happenings Cityscape Figurative Comic

Exhibitions

Committed to Print

1988

American Prints, 1960–1985

1987

Prints of the Sixties

1973

Twenty Lithographs: Graphic Art Processes

1941