Robert David Brady

Mrs. Fox by Robert David Brady, 1981, hand-built ceramic, Honolulu Museum of Art

Robert Brady is a modernist American sculptor who works in ceramics and wood. He was born in Reno, Nevada in 1946. Brady attended the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland, California from 1964 to 1968, before entering the University of California, Davis, where he worked with Robert Arneson and received a MFA in 1975. Since 1975, he has taught art at California State University, Sacramento.

Brady worked primarily in clay as an art student. In the 1970s, he established his reputation as one of the moving forces in Bay Area figurative ceramic sculpture. Mrs. Fox, a hand-built ceramic sculpture from 1981, in the collection of the Honolulu Museum of Art, is an example of this. He began experimenting with wood in 1986, and in this medium was able to create thin, large-scale figures with delicate postures that would be difficult to achieve in clay. He explores the human figure with emphasis on spiritual and mythological archetypes. His figures are typically elongated, with enigmatic symbols lightly carved into the surfaces.

The Crocker Art Museum (Sacramento, California), the Honolulu Museum of Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Oakland Museum of California (Oakland, California), the Renwick Gallery (Washington, D. C.), the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam) are among the public collections holding works by Robert David Brady.

This artist has no relationship to the Robert Brady Museum (Museo Robert Brady) in Cuernavaca, Mexico founded by a different Robert Brady (1928–1986).

References

• Driesbach, Janice and T. H. Garver, Robert Brady, A Survey Exhibition, Sacramento, Crocker Art Museum, 1989.