OCMA | Orange County Museum of Art

Bruce Conner was born in McPherson, Kansas, in 1933 and studied art at Wichita University, the University of Nebraska, the Brooklyn Art School, and the University of Colorado. Moving to San Francisco in 1957, Conner became involved with the Beatniks and first made a name for himself in the 1950s with assemblages/sculptures of found objects. In the late 1950s, he began making short movies that proved highly influential and established him as one of the seminal figures in the history of independent, avant-garde filmmaking. Conner's first film, A Movie (1958), a visual collage created from bits of B-movies, newsreels, and other footage, has been listed on the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress. Connor was also responsible for Crossroads (1976), produced with funds from the National Endowment for the Arts, which turned the destructive and sinister atom-bomb test in Bikini Atoll into elegiac visual poetry.
His work has been shown at Michael Kohn Gallery, Los Angeles; Barbara Gladstone, New York; and Gallery Paule Anglim, San Francisco. Museum exhibitions include the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena; the Foundation Cartier, Paris; and a touring exhibition produced by the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis. Conner?s work has also been featured in many recurring exhibitions, including the 1997 Whitney Biennial, Site Santa Fe 2004, the 2006 Berlin Biennial, and the 2008 Carnegie International. He continued to live and work in San Francisco, until his death in 2008.