Fred Eversley, a sculptor who uses techniques that go back to Isaac Newton to create another world disc of colored resin, passed away in Manhattan on March 14th. He was 83 years old.
His death in the hospital was confirmed by his wife, Maria Larson. He said he died after a brief illness.
Eversley was a 12- or 13-year-old Brooklyn boy when he first learned that the centrifugal force created by rotating a container of liquid pushes its surface into a parabola. Newton did this with a bucket and rope. Eversley, who works in her parents' basement, used Jell-O pie plates on the turntable.
After giving up his engineering career when he returned to ideas nearly 30 years later, he was a fledgling sculptor in a busy community of artists in Venice Beach, California, experimenting with plastics and dyes. He performed the process of casting individual layers of rotating cylindrical resin-colored violet, amber and blue using liquid polyester called resin, called “the cheapest, least toxic and least transparent.”
The result was a shape he pasted over the next 55 years. A semi-transparent disc, slightly larger than a vinyl record, appears perpendicular to the pedestal. Each disc has a highly refined parabolic concave on one side, creating a lens-like optical effect that sharpens and minimizes the view behind it. At the same time, colors glow and change dramatically depending on the light in a particular room and the movement of the viewer. As Eversley liked to say, it becomes a kind of kinetic sculpture without any elements of motion.
Over the years, Eversley worked on a variety of scales, similar to opaque discs, creating other parabolas by slicing resin rings and tubes at sharp angles. Steadily successful in the Public Commission's victory, he installed a rising curve of futuristic steel or sparkling polyurethane at West Palm Beach, Florida, and at Miami International Airport, on the southern tip of Central Park.
An attractive and independent man, he has acquired friends, mentors and patrons wherever he goes. He used a sculptor Charles Matox's lathe to spin the first mold, introduced by Robert Rauschenberg to gallerist Leo Castelli, and according to his wife, after meeting him in the elevator, he became close friends with influential collector Hans Heinrich Thyssen Vernmissa.
Early on, he showed his work with other members who have come to be known as Light and Space Movement. He is also associated with finishing fetish, a movement that emphasizes the labor-intensive perfection of new materials and surfaces, and although his work was found to be inadequately political among other black artists, he was sometimes grouped with the movement of the black arts. (He made his first opaque disc after sculptor John McCracken jokingly joked with him to make “black art” a can of black pigment.)
Still, in his engineering background, Eversley thought that he was doing something different than what his peers did. His lasting interest was energy in a scientific sense. And his enduring love, whether light or sound, was the only form of bringing it back to a single focus, a parabola.
Frederick John Eversley was born on August 28, 1941 in Brooklyn. His mother, Beatrice (Ziphax) Eversley, was taught in elementary school. His paternal grandmother was Jewish, and his maternal grandmother was a member of the Cinecock country.
In addition to his wife, he was survived by three young brothers, Lani, Donald and Thomas Eversley.
As a child, Eversley listened to conversations between his father and other engineers and wanted to try out his grandfather's camera equipment. He attended Progressive Camp Kinderland in Massachusetts. He worked as a teenager at the Folklore Center in Greenwich Village and also for his father's airline. Graduated from Brooklyn Technical High School. In Brooklyn's Bedford Stuyvesant area, I met jazz greats like John Coltrane and Ella Fitzgerald at the Putnam Central Club, which my grandfather founded.
He was the first black man to live on the Carnegie Mellon University campus in Pittsburgh, and was then known as the Carnegie Institute of Technology. In his fourth grade, the father of a fraternal brother offered him a job at Weil Laboratories in El Segundo, California. He was already accepted into medical school. However, he later began dating a painting student with plans to spend the summer in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico.
“That's a long story,” he recalled in a 2022 interview with art historian Daniel Austeen with 2022's monograph Fred Eversley: Parabolic Lens.
That fall he moved to Venice Beach and began testing for NASA, private companies and the Department of Defense. This includes designing special test chambers that attacked the Apollo space capsule with high intensity noise.
His plans were derailed once again in a serious car accident in January 1967 and were temporarily unable to work. By then, he was surrounded by artists like James Tarrell. Richard Dievenkorn, the studio is visible from his apartment. McLucken moved next door. Many of them came to him to help with engineering issues.
“I was paying for disabled people,” Eversley explained in a monograph.
He began with the clarity of the photographs connected to the sides of the plastic cubes illuminated by fluorescent spheres. But soon, with the encouragement of friends like Mr. Matox, John Altoon and Robert Rauschenberg, he dropped the photos and focused on plastic, casting, sparkling rectangles and cones. When Altoon died in 1969, Eversley took over his studio, which was designed by Frank Gehry.
Soon, Eversley enjoyed a debut that a few artists could dream of. In a day in 1970, he sold two pieces directly to painter and influential gallerist Betty Parsons, and offered a solo show at Malcia Tucker's Whitney Art Museum. That year he also held several solo shows at commercial galleries in New York, Chicago and Newport Beach, California, appearing in more than 12 group shows, including not only one in New York's Pace Gallery and Tokyo, but also some in California.
Despite this explosive beginning, over much of his career, Mr. Eversley has been and must have been his own best salesman. Luckily, he may have downplayed it, but he had the talent for it.
“I really don't believe that my business techniques are probably so aggressive,” he said in a 1980 interview with Ocular Magazine.
In 2018 he signed with David Kordansky Gallery, which has locations in Los Angeles and New York. The following year, after a few years of disputes with the Venice Beach landlord, he returned to New York, where he owned a five-storey loft building in Soho. In 2023, Cordansky performed his first New York solo show since 1976, “Fred Eversley: Cylindrical Lens.” For that show he created a series of beautifully colored 7-9 feet tall monoliths, realizing the ideas he originally had decades ago. Amanda Gluibizzi described on Brooklyn Rail as “a massive lith and space age at the same time.”
Shortly before his death, Larson, an architect who also managed her husband's studio, said Eversley was talking about the fascinating life he had. If so, it must have been because he had at least partly moved forward enthusiastically to meet at every opportunity.
“Fred has appeared,” Larson said. “He appeared everywhere. He said, 'Maria, we need to show up.' ”
