Robert H. Rohm

Robert Rohm died peacefully at his home in Charlestown, Rhode Island, on June 4, 2013. He was born in Cincinnati Ohio in 1934, after his father and mother, Hermann G. Rohm and Anna K. Sager Rohm immigrated to America from Germany over a decade earlier in 1923. He was predeceased by his parents, brother-in-law, Frank W. McGuinn and a sister, Gerda Anna Rohm McGuinn. In addition to his wife Candy Adriance, he is survived by his sons, Hans, in Raleigh, NC, and Kyle and adored daughter-in-law Kim, of Providence, RI, and grandchildren Elsa, Aidan and Casey Rohm. He had a treasured connection to his niece, Soni Adriance, of Washington, DC and Nairobi, Kenya. He is also survived by his first wife, Patricia Arrow, of Charlestown, RI, a fiber artist and dancer, with whom he collaborated on sculpture dance performance pieces at the University of Rhode Island and the Boston Museum of Fine Arts to critical acclaim in 1972 and 1973. An internationally known sculptor and educator, Rohm received a Bachelor of Industrial Design Degree from Pratt Institute in New York and received his Master of Fine Arts degree from Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan. His early sculpture from the 1960’s, which employed elements of heavy howser rope, corrugated metal pipe and wood elements, was highly regarded by art critics like Marcia Tucker. She and others rightly thought that Rohm’s use of unadorned materials shaped by natural forces such as gravity were a perfect reflection of a progressive anti-illusionism just becoming apparent in art, the result of which was sculpture based on the use of industrial materials and basic physical processes. His subsequent career spanned more than 5 decades, with solo and group exhibitions at museums and galleries nationally and internationally, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, the San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art, the Seattle Art Museum and the Kunsthalle, Zurich, Switzerland. Both his sculptures and works on paper are in many public and private collections nationally and internationally. In frequent one-person exhibitions at O.K. Harris Gallery in Soho dating back to 1973, Rohm’s work continued to evolve in both materials and form, moving toward suggestions of figuration and narrative imagery while always retaining its high quality of craftsmanship and abstraction. His most recent work opened at O.K. Harris this past January where he showed 6 elegant, columnar sculptures constructed of welded and bent steel rods covered in a surface of colored wax. These have a linear, almost graphic quality, skeletally framing open voids of interior space. Other opaque forms, often echoing organic shapes but which are ultimately abstract solids, are sometimes nestled, suspended or bound within these voids. His long dedication to sculpture was echoed in his inspired teaching of undergraduates. After initially returning to teach at Pratt, Bob moved to Rhode Island in 1965 after receiving a Guggenheim Grant in 1964 and became a faculty member in the Art Department (later Department of Art and Art History) at the University of Rhode Island where he helped establish the modern practice of sculpture education in Kingston. Among other initiatives, he contributed to the early success of the URI Gallery and personally established the ongoing Visual Arts Program of Sea Grant with colleague Scott Nixon. A familiar and towering figure around the department in his long shop coat, he influenced the arts at the University for a generation, encouraging hundreds of students through his own practice and his deep experience in the world of contemporary art. A number of his best URI students, including Ree Morton, Willy Heeks, Matthew McClune and Frank Del Deo, became well-known artists and curators. Both before and after his retirement from the University, one of his many other passions were travel. After a nine month around-the-world trip with Candy, in 1987, they traveled often, visiting scores of countries together, occasionally on solo trips or in the company of close friends including his long time OK Harris art dealer and friend Ivan Karp and his wife, Marilynn. Experiencing other peoples and places first hand was a memorable part of Bob and Candy’s life together even when things went adventurously awry - when travelling in Mali with the Karps in 1999, their car rolled over on an isolated desert road - a disastrous enough accident that they never reached their ultimate destination, the ancient city of Timbuktu. These trips exerted a powerful influence on his art as his direct experiences of world cultures informed both the imagery and forms of his sculpture. Bob’s sophisticated eye selected vernacular materials (like the fabulous array of woven fish traps or ornate ritual figures from Asia) that wound up displayed in his home alongside a private collection of most contemporary western art works. These forms, colors and surfaces would often be reinterpreted into more abstract compositions in his own sculptures mixing with strong biographical and biomorphic references as well. After residing in Wakefield for several decades, Bob and Candy moved to a house of their own design in Charlestown where he cultivated and composed a landscape of broad open fields, natural woodlands and distant vistas to the north. The grounds also included a special Zen-inspired garden near the house. In addition to art and travel, over the past twenty years, Bob took on leadership roles in a number of civic and charitable organizations. For two years he taught English as a Second Language Classes. Serving on the Charlestown Planning Commission for eight years, he was its Chair from 2002 to 2008, envisioning and overseeing the passage of the Charlestown Mixed-use Village Overlay district. He was a founding member of the Jamestown Community Farm that grows and distributes organic produce to food pantries and soup kitchens throughout the state. In addition to being an active board member of the Farm and the creator of their sponsor program he was happy to roll up his sleeves to work the farm fields. All of Bob’s family, friends, colleagues, and students knew he did everything with a passion - running in marathons, going on rigorous retreats in a Thai Buddhist monastery, talking with students and friends about contemporary issues and most of all creating an imaginative and lasting body of art. Donations may be made in his memory to the The Jamestown Community Farm Inc, P.O.Box352, 40 Eldred Avenue, Jamestown, RI 02835. (A 501 (©) (3) organization) A public memorial service is being planned for a future date.