Remembering the Future with Herb Greene, a feature length documentary film in progress
Production taking place 2022-2023
Slated to be released 2024
Remembering the Future with Herb Greene is a feature-length documentary that delves into the complicated legacy and groundbreaking work of architect and artist Herb Greene, a visionary that rose out of Norman, Oklahoma.
A journey of admiration and discovery, the filmmaker uncovers the intricate layers that surround her great uncle’s life from his Jewish upbringing in depression era New York, to pioneering an avant-garde movement under the mentorship of Bruce Goff whose non-conformist pedagogy and often overlooked counterculture architecture movement grew out of Oklahoma in the 1950’s.
The film uncovers a story about a family’s legacy while unearthing the complex layers of inspiration, prejudice, triumphs, and losses that shaped Herb Greene’s life, revealing the power of creative freedom.
Learn more HERE
Herb Greene in Palm Springs Modernism Week
Palm Springs Modernism Week, 2023
Palm Springs, California
Friday, February 24th
This year’s Palm Springs Modernism Week will be held Feb. 16-26, 2023 in Palm Springs, CA. This festival celebrates mid-century modern design, architecture, art, fashion, and culture.
On Feb. 24th, from 11:00-12:00, at the CAMP Theater, the team for Remembering the Future with Herb Greene will present a work-in-progress sample of the film in the making, followed by a panel discussion with Art Institute of Chicago curator Craig Lee, producer Lila Cohen, and historian Alan Hess.
Buy Tickets HERE
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Reflections with Herb Greene: Monterey Design Conference 2022
Asilomar Conference Grounds
Monterey, California
Saturday, October 29th
Herb Greene speaks at the coveted Monterey Design Conference as the MDC Tribal Elder in conversation with architect Pierluigi Serraino as well as great niece and architect Lila Cohen. Hundreds of architects and designers gather to attend the retrospective presentation of Greene’s Avant-garde architectural work in Oklahoma that received international acclaim as well as lesser known work from Texas and Kentucky. Inside Julia Morgan’s distinguished Merrill Hall, Greene shares reflections on his time with Bruce Goff and John Lautner as well as influence from Frank Lloyd Wright and others. The presentation contains many never before seen drawings, photos and selected collage paintings that Greene created throughout various periods of his career.
Additionally Lila Cohen announces the in progress film project Remembering the Future with Herb Greene on his work and the misplaced history of organic architecture and will share the film trailer. A book signing of Generations will be held at the conference following the presentation.
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Herb Greene / Fall Newsletter 2022
News from the Studio of Herb Greene
October 21, 2022
It feels good to say there’s been much to celebrate this year including turning 93. Almost a year ago I attended a large solo exhibition of my painting and was filmed re-visiting three of my early projects in Oklahoma as a full length documentary project on the history of Organic Modernism and my work got underway. It’s been fun revisiting some of my work as well as Bruce Goff’s, Mickey Muennig’s, and others while remembering the world in the 50’s and reflecting on where it is now.
The exhibition and film project activities helped bring attention to the deteriorated conditions of the Prairie House and Joyce Residence. The Prairie House has since been acquired by a non-profit that formed The Prairie House Preservation Society while the Joyce Residence garnered the attention of a private buyer who has started working with me on restoring the building!
At the end of this month I have the honor of speaking at the Monterey Design Conference on Saturday October 29th and I look forward to the stories that will be shared. With everything going on I’m grateful to have my health and desire to keep moving. I hope you will join me.
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Exhibition Catalogue, Herb Greene: Mapping the Mental Continuum
Exhibition Catalogue
Published by Norman Arts Council
November, 2021
Herb Greene: Mapping the Mental Continuum, includes an in-depth interview with Greene in addition to essays and striking images of paintings, architectural drawings and photographs. The 46 page catalogue features Images, emotions, imagination: the collages of Herb Greene, by Francesca Giani and an essay by Herb Greene, Collage as Image and Event.
The catalogue is now available for purchase from Norman Arts Council in the MAINSITE Contemporary Art gallery or to purchase online.
Purchase Online: URL
Herb Greene: Mapping the Mental Continuum
MAINSITE Contemporary Art, Norman Arts Council
October 8, 2021 – November 27, 2021
MAINSITE Contemporary Art is honored to host an exhibition of works by architect and visual artist Herb Greene. The event marks the first solo exhibition of Greene’s work in Norman, where he studied architecture under Bruce Goff at the University of Oklahoma in the 1950s and built the iconic Prairie House in 1962. Mapping the Mental Continuum surveys Herb Greene’s use of ‘collage thinking’ as a theoretical and aesthetic expression of Organic philosophy. The importance of collage to Greene’s art and architecture manifests itself in the varied and simultaneous perspectives existing within a single image.
Herb Greene / Winter Newsletter 2021
News from the Studio of Herb Greene
January 27, 2021
As we welcome in a New Year I am looking forward with optimism to the future and reflecting on recent news. Several publications will feature my work in 2021, both in print and online. I am also pleased to announce a solo exhibition of my collage paintings that will be on view at MAINSITE Contemporary Art this coming Fall. I am also delighted to share a virtual tour of the Unitarian church I designed in Lexington, produced by the Blue Grass Trust for Historic Preservation.
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Virtual Tour: Unitarian Universalist Church of Lexington
Blue Grass Trust for Historic Preservation, Virtual deTour
December , 2020
Take a virtual tour of the Unitarian Universalist Church of Lexington, Kentucky. I designed this organic modernist sanctuary for the church in 1965. The building was constructed with a wood-lined interior and tilted operable glass panels that look out toward the expansive view. The aesthetic intention was to create a house of worship grounded in a relationship to the surrounding landscape in a circular space with a hovering roof supported by the steel trusses, designed to minimize structure and maximize an open floor plan.
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Herb Greene / Summer Newsletter 2020
News from the Studio of Herb Greene
June 7, 2020
As we approach the Summer season, I would like to share recent news and a few resources that people can enjoy from their homes during the pandemic. Extended time periods of physical distancing calls for creative ways to remain engaged and with this in mind, I am pleased to announce upcoming publications and online viewing opportunities.
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Herb Greene / Winter Newsletter 2020
News from the Studio of Herb Greene
January 3, 2020
As we welcome in a New Year, I am looking forward to several events and exhibitions soon to come in 2020. The much anticipated, Renegades, Bruce Goff and the American School, opens at The Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art at the end of January, coinciding with a show at Price Tower Arts Center, featuring paintings by Bruce Goff and myself. I am also pleased to announce a solo exhibition of my collage paintings that will be on view at MAINSITE Contemporary Art in May.
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Renegades: Bruce Goff and the American School of Architecture
Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art, University of Oklahoma
January 23 – April 5, 2019
Renegades: Bruce Goff and the American School of Architecture, a joint exhibition between the University of Oklahoma’s Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art and the Christopher C. Gibbs School of Architecture, opens, Thursday, Jan. 23 at 7 p.m. The opening night will consist of a panel discussion at 7 p.m. with exhibition curator Luca Guido, lead designer Michael Hoffner, and the College of Architecture’s Director of Research Initiatives and Strategic Planning Angela Person. Following the panel, the exhibition will officially open to the public at 8 p.m. in the Nancy Johnston Records Gallery.
Publication Available for Pre-Order
Renegades: Bruce Goff and the American School of Architecture
The Gibbs College of Architecture, University of Oklahoma Press
The Gibbs College of Architecture is excited to announce that Renegades: Bruce Goff and the American School of Architecture(University of Oklahoma Press 2020). Edited by Luca Guido, Stephanie Pilat, and Angela Person, this volume explores the fraught history of this distinctively American movement born on the Oklahoma prairie. Renegades features essays by leading scholars and includes a wide range of images, including rare, never-before-published sketches and models. Together these essays and illustrations map the contours of an American architecture that combines this country’s landscape and technology through experimentation and invention, assembling the diversity of the United States into structures of true beauty. Renegades for the first time fully captures the essence and conveys the importance of the American School of architecture.
Renè Peralta: Herb Greene Teaching Fellow
University of Oklahoma, The Gibbs College of Architecture
September 15, 2019
The Gibbs College of Architecture recently welcomed its first Herb Greene Teaching Fellow, Renè Peralta. Renè has been a professor in the Department of Architecture and Urban Design at UCLA, professor of Urban Design at the University of Washington in St. Louis and, from 2012-2014, was Director of the Master of Science in Architecture at Woodbury University in San Diego. In addition to his endeavors in academia, Renè has co-edited two books, Here is Tijuana (2006) and Temporary Paradise: A Commemorative Edition (2018), and serves as the co-director of Generica Architecture.
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Herb Greene Newsletter / Summer 2019
News from the Studio of Herb Greene
August 20, 2019
The Summer Newsletter highlights recent developments, such as exhibitions, current publications and important announcements. Click the link below to read more about Renè Peralta, the first Herb Greene Teaching Fellow at The Gibbs College of Architecture; the forthcoming publication by Clark Thenhaus, Unresolved Legibility in Ten Residential Types, which features the Prairie House in chapter two of the book; and updates regarding 2020 exhibitions and the Prairie House restoration project news.
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The American School Symposium
University of Oklahoma, Buskuhl Gallery of Gould Hall
April 15, 2019
American School architects, including “Prairie House” architect Herb Greene, as well as prominent architectural historian Christopher Mead, will headline the Christopher C. Gibbs College of Architecture’s “The American School Symposium” on Monday, April 15, on the OU Norman campus. The symposium will begin with a public lecture by Dr. Christopher Mead, who will speak about the work of Bart Prince within the context of an American tradition, including the work of Thomas Jefferson, Bruce Goff and Frank Lloyd Wright. Following Mead’s lecture, a panel discussion, moderated by Mead, will feature American School alumni and architects, including Nelson Brackin, Ernest Burden, Arthur Dyson and Herb Greene.
Renegades: Bruce Goff and the American School of Architecture
University of Oklahoma, Bizzell Memorial Library
September 22, 2018 – July 10, 2019
University of Oklahoma, Tulsa, Schusterman Library
July 15, 2019 – October 21, 2019
“A new school, probably the only indigenous one in the United States” is how the architect Donald MacDonald described Bruce Goff and Herb Greene’s influence on the University of Oklahoma School of Architecture from 1947 through the 1960s. The famous architects transformed the ways architecture was learned, taught and practiced, creating a uniquely American architectural style now represented in an archive at the University of Oklahoma Libraries and displayed in an exhibition opening at the Norman campus and traveling in part to the Tulsa campus.
American School installation at the Venice Architecture Biennale
“Time Space Existence” exhibit hosted bythe European Cultural Center (ECC)
May 26, 2018 – November 25, 2018
The Christopher C. Gibbs College of Architecture exhibition opened May 26, 2018, and celebrates the pioneering efforts of OU Architecture professors during the 1950s and 1960s, including Bruce Goff and Herb Greene, as well as their students.Goff, Greene, and others at OU re-imagined the possibilities of the built environment, beginning fresh with each new project. To tell this story, the Venice exhibit on The American School is centered around the theme “Do Not Try To Remember,” a phrase often used in Goff’s teachings.
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Generations: Six Decades of Collage Art and Architecture
A monograph by Herb Greene and Lila Cohen
Book Release, Spring of 2016
Generations showcases six decades of Herb Greene’s art and architecture informed by his interest in science and history. This illustrated monograph showcases large-scale images of Greene’s architecture alongside his collage paintings and Armature drawings, in a way that reveals the unified philosophy behind all of his work. The purpose of the book is to tell a story of the important interrelationships between art, science, and philosophy.
Herb Greene Lecture- Creating_Making the Prairie House
University of Oklahoma, Christopher C. Gibbs School of Architecture
April 14, 2017
Herb Greene in conversation with Lila Cohen, discuss his life as an architect and artist. In 1953 Greenecompleted his degree in architecture, studying under Bruce Goff. Four years later he returned to the University of Oklahoma as an Assistant Professor of Architecture. In 1961 Greene completed the visionary “Prairie House”, which caused an international sensation after it was published in LIFE and Look Magazine, the London Times, and throughout Europe and Japan. During this talk, Greene reflects on his career, including this famous project.
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“Spirit in the Mind” Featured on Cover of “Panpsychism: Contemporary Perspectives”
“Panpsychism: Contemporary Perspectives”
Published, October 3, 2016
“Spirit in the Mind”, a collage painting by Herb Greene, has been chosen for the cover of “Panpsychism: Contemporary Perspectives”, edited by Godehard Bruntrup and Ludwig Jaskolla. This book features contemporary arguments for panpsychism as a genuine alternative in analytic philosophy of mind in the 21st century. Different varieties of panpsychism are represented and systematically related to each other in the volume’s 16 essays, which feature not only proponents of panpsychism but also prominent critics from both the physicalist and non-physicalist camps.
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Visual Acoustics: The Modernism of Julius Shulman
Documentary by Eric Brickner
Film Release, October 9, 2009
“Visual Acoustics”, narrated by Dustin Hoffman, celebrates the life and career of Julius Shulman, the world’s greatest architectural photographer, whose images brought modern architecture to the American mainstream.Shulmancaptured the work of nearly every majormodern and progressive architect since the 1930s. The film featureshis collaborations with Frank Gehry, Herb Greene, John Lautner, Richard Meier, Richard Neutra, Rudolph Schindler, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Frank Lloyd Wright