Since 1990, Russell Crotty's vast body of work challenges the preconceptions of drawing as primary medium, exploring and expanding the notion of “works on paper” and pushing the genre towards minimal sculptural installation. His practice chronicles an idiosyncratic commentary on astronomy, landscape, and the natural and manmade world, resulting in an extensive oeuvre of drawings, collages, paintings, large-scale books, and drawings on paper-coated suspended globes.
Russell Crotty was born in San Rafael, California, and received his BFA from San Francisco Art Institute with honors in 1978. In 1980, he received his MFA from University of California, Irvine. Crotty is a 2015 Guggenheim Fellow. He received a 1999 Visual Arts Fellowship from the Peter Reed Foundation, New York and a 1991 Visual Arts Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. Crotty's past exhibitions include the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Turner Contemporary, United Kingdom; The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA, Los Angeles; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Institut Valencià d'Art Modern, Valencia, Spain; Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco; Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami; Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego; Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston; and Vancouver Art Gallery, British Columbia. His work is in the permanent collections of many prominent institutions, including Centre Pompidou, Paris; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; New York Public Library, New York, NY; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego; San José Museum of Art; Santa Barbara Museum of Art; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Princeton University Art Museum; Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge; Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami; High Museum of Art, Atlanta; Dallas Museum of Art; The Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City; NASA Art Program; and the US Department of State’s “ART in Embassies Program” at the Embassy of the United States, Beijing, China. Today, Crotty lives in Ojai and works in Ventura, California.