John McCracken was born in Berkeley, Calif., in 1934. He attended the California College of Arts and Crafts, where he studied with Gordon Onslow-Ford and Tony DeLap. In 1965, while still a student, McCracken showed his painted and slotted wooden sculptures at the Nicholas Wilder Gallery in Los Angeles. The following year he began a distinguished teaching career at the newly founded art department of the University of California, Irvine, under the direction of John Coplans.
McCracken was a significant participant in the 1960’s art scene in L.A. At the time he was associated with the California version of Minimalism contentiously known as Finish Fetish because of the artists’ meticulous craftsmanship and use of the highly polished surfaces and brilliant colors. In 1966 he developed what became his signature sculptural form: tall leaning planks with phrases gleaned from fashion magazines, such as Think Pink, The Absolutely Naked Fragrance and Don’t Tell Me When to Stop.
McCracken’s works were included in nearly all the major sculpture exhibitions of the 1960s, such as “Primary Structures” at the Jewish Museum (1966), “American Sculpture of the Sixties” at the L.A. County Museum of Art (1967) and “Art of the Real” at the Museum of Modern Art (1969). During the 1970s and early ’80s, a period when he devoted his time to teaching at the University of Nevada in Reno and Las Vegas and at the University of California, Santa Barbara, McCracken received relatively little critical attention. A 1985 move to Los Angeles with his wife, artist Gail Barringer, revived his career in terms of newly conceived bodies of work, gallery and museum exhibitions, and recognition by a younger generation of artists, dealers, and curators. Retrospectives of his work have appeared at P.S. 1 (1986) and at the Kunsthalle Basel (1995). In 1994 McCracken and Barringer moved to New Mexico, where a number of former Los Angeles artists now reside.
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