Ralph CoburnRandom Sequence

Trained originally as an architect at MIT in the 1940s, Boston-based artist Ralph Coburn worked outside the mainstream, exploring ideas of seriality, authorship, and participatory aesthetics. Inserting himself into a circle of art students and professors, Coburn eventually left architecture school and traveled to Paris and New York, steeping himself in contemporary theories of art. His graphic color-block paintings from the 1950s often derive from motifs in landscape or the urban environment; exceptional is the choice by Coburn to leave their specific arrangement to the owner or exhibitor, an early notion of interactivity yet to be credited to Coburn that anticipated similar strategies made popular in recent decades. The Arts Club of Chicago exhibits an unrealized installation conceived by the artist in 1962, rehanging paintings over the course of the exhibition.