COSTA MESA, CALIF.- As a teenager in Brooklyn, Fred Eversley filled a pie pan with Jell-O and spun it on a turntable in his father’s basement laboratory. It was one of his many early science experiments, inspired by an article in Popular Mechanics about Isaac Newton’s contributions to modern physics involving a bucket of water and a rope.
Eversley’s motion produced a concave parabolic hollow in the quivering Jell-O that turned out to be his first artwork, though he didn’t know it at the time. He pursued engineering first, becoming an artist in 1967 — and he has essentially applied the technique of centripetal force in endless variations for more than five decades in his sculpture practice. He casts liquid plastics tinted with pigments in molds and gives them a good spin on modified turntables, producing parabolic forms that he hand-polishes to a lustrous sheen.
These seductive fish-eye lenses, varying in translucency and up to 8 feet wide, are central to the story of the Light and Space movement in Los Angeles in the 1960s and ’70s, of which Eversley was an unheralded pioneer, working alongside artists like James Turrell, Robert Irwin and Larry Bell, all of whom explored perceptual phenomena.
Ever since, Eversley has been drawing viewers into mesmerizing optical and acoustic experiences, coloring and reframing the world through and around his lenses. “The parabola is the perfect concentrator of all energy to a single focal point,” said Eversley, now 81, who remembers being the only African American in the school of engineering at Carnegie Mellon. “I’m all about universality. I don’t like art that you have to know art history to appreciate.”
Now the artist has come full circle. “Fred Eversley: Reflecting Back (the World)” is one of several inaugural shows opening Oct. 8 at the Orange County Museum of Art, on the campus of the Segerstrom Center for the Arts in Costa Mesa. The museum’s dramatic and curvaceous new building, double the size of its former home in Newport Beach, was designed by Pritzker Prize-winning architect Thom Mayne, of the firm Morphosis, who, like Eversley, has been based in Los Angeles for more than five decades.
The show, which runs through Jan. 2, pays tribute to Eversley’s long history of inclusion in exhibitions at each of the museum’s three previous locations, most notably his 1977 solo show that was pivotal in introducing his work to collectors in Southern California and included the museum’s acquisition of a 1976 black opaque lens.
The small catalog from that show was one of the few on Eversley that Kim Conaty, now a curator at the Whitney Museum, could find when researching her 2016 exhibition, “Fred Eversley: Black, White, Gray,” shown at Art + Practice in Los Angeles and at the Rose Art Museum in Waltham, Massachusetts.
“It’s interesting to work with an artist who has this incredible history, who’s still extremely active, and you recognize the scholarship is not there,” Conaty said. (Eversley will get his most comprehensive publication and survey to date at the Benton Museum of Art at Pomona College, as part of the Getty Foundation’s grant program Pacific Standard Time 2024.)
Even with inconsistent institutional backing, however, Eversley has always supported himself with his science-based art. “I’ve been lucky to have had really great commissions, without having a famous gallery doing it for me,” he said, noting his 35-foot-tall, diagonally bisected cylinder in polished stainless steel and neon, titled “Parabolic Flight,” installed in 1980 at the Miami International Airport.
Lately, the David Kordansky Gallery has been helping raise Eversley’s profile, with solo shows at its Los Angeles base and recent museum acquisitions by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston and the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. The artist’s first one-man show in New York since the mid-1970s is planned for the gallery’s Chelsea branch next spring.
Kordansky believes Eversley suffered over the years from the art world’s neglect of Black artists of his generation coupled with the view of the Light and Space movement as a nonserious version of New York’s minimalism. Early on, “Light and Space was seen as a kind of fad,” Kordansky said. “Historically, when we look back on it, we realize just how visionary it was.”
Conaty called the new Eversley show in Orange County “a great institutional return to an artist from their own backyard,” adding that the museum was early to acquire a number of artists working in Los Angeles in the 1960s and 1970s. (John Baldessari, Chris Burden, Vija Celmins and Charles Ray are among those it supported before other institutions in the area.)
