Michael Brewster (artist)
Michael Leslie Brewster (August 15, 1946June 19, 2016) was an American artist, recognized for coining the term “acoustic sculpture.” He worked with sound to create sonic environments beginning in the 1970s until 2016. His works were shown across the United States and Europe, and are in permanent collections, notably the Solomon Guggenheim Museum, the Fondo per Arte Italiano, Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, and the Giuseppe Panza Collection. Life Brewster was born in Eugene, Oregon in 1946. He spent a majority of his youth in São Paulo, Brazil as an expatriate between 1950 and 1964. In high school, he became fluent in Portuguese and developed an interest in theater and set design. Brewster returned to the United States in 1964 to attend Pomona College, in Claremont, California. After graduating in 1968 with a B.A in Sculpture, he continued on to Claremont Graduate School (now Claremont Graduate University) to receive his M.F.A in 1970. Brewster taught nontraditional sculpture at Bradley University in Peoria, Illinois. He moved back to the West Coast to instruct in sculpture and painting at La Verne and Pomona Colleges. In 1973, Brewster began teaching at Claremont Graduate University, where he remained for forty-one years, building the studio art program, chairing the department, and expanding the school's reputation nationally. He was awarded the first Roland Reiss Endowed Chair in Art. Brewster died on June 19, 2016, at the age of 69. Artistic work Lights In the late 1960s, Brewster built a set of 25 light units he named “Flashers.” These were used in various outdoor installations in the Mojave Desert. Starting in the mid-1970s, he redesigned them to float in water, produced them in a larger quantity, and called them “Floating Flashers.” They were shown in the Grand Canal in Venice, Italy, Groningen, Holland, and Gumsluk Bay, Turkey. Sound Brewster explained his sonic sculptures: “My means is sound, especially its effects; but my issues are sculptural, not musical. Sculpture, in its most expanded sense, is the mode of experience that I find truest. I like to think about what an expanded sculptural experience could be: a full bodied bunch of sensation around being here, in the realm of the actual, the physical, in this multi-dimensional world. I’m trying to expand the sculptural experience by addressing, if not celebrating, our own existence as spatial, physical entities inhabiting all our dimensions. Sculpture should be a category of experience, not just a category of physical objects for us to stand back and behold.” Brewster's two major bodies of works are his Acoustic Sculptures and his Sonic Drawings. Brewster describes these works as follows: "A typical Acoustic Sculpture is a mix of electronic tones emitted into a bare room by a single loudspeaker. The sounds echoing through each other produce a field of sound populated by places of differing loudness and tonal content. To see an Acoustic Sculpture, we must shift our sculpture viewing habits from the "stand and look" behavior to an exploratory "move and listen" approach; slowly walking our