Richard Haymes
Sculptures: Boxes, Objects & Cabinets
Richard Haymes
gossip4richard@yahoo.com
Richard Haymes: Bio/Statement
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orn in March 1953, I am a native New Yorker, and have been living with my partner of 18 years, author and artist, Michael DeJong, 
and our dog, Jack, in Jersey City since 2002.
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A 1974 graduate of the Communications Design Department at
Michael DeJong (l) and Richard Haymes Parsons School of Design, I spent the first 13 years of my professional life as a graphic designer and art director.
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My design studio specialized in clients in the artworld, including several art galleries 
during the Soho art boom of the 1970s and 80s, as well as other established cultural and arts institutions such as museums and dance companies:
420 West Broadway, New York
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Leo Castelli Gallery~Sonnabend Gallery
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Leo Castelli Gallery~Sonnabend GalleryMetro-Pictures~Blum-Helman Gallery
Sperrone-Westwater-Fisher~Ronald Feldman Fine Arts~Jill Kornblee Gallery~Holly Solomon Gallery~Barbara Gladstsone Gallery
Pamela Adler Gallery~Max Protech Gallery
Trisha Brown Dance Co~Merce Cunningham Dance Co~Art in America Magazine~
The Metropolitan Museum of Art~
The Hudson River Museum~The Queens Museum~The Museum of Modern Art
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I also had the unique privilege of art directing projects one-on-one with several of the leading artists of the late 20th Century including:
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Claes Oldenburg ~ Richard Serra Ellsworth Kelly ~ Roy Lichtenstein
Hanna Darboven ~ Cindy Sherman Andy Warhol ~ Komar-Malamud
Dan Flavin ~ Robert Morris
Hannah Darboven ~ Julian Schnabel
Robert Rauschenberg ~ Robert Longo
Keith Sonnier ~ Cy Twombly
Jasper Johns ~ The Estate of
Joseph Cornell
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HANS NAMUTH, 25th Anniversary of Leo Castelli Gallery, The Odeon, New York 1982
Standing left - right
Ellsworth Kelly, Dan Flavin, Joseph Kosuth, Richard Serra, Lawerence Weiner,
Nassos Daphnis, Jasper Johns, Claes Oldenberg, Salvatore Scarpitta, Richard
Artschwager, Mia Westerlund Roosen, Cletus Johnson, and Keith Sonnier
Seated left - right
Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, Leo Castelli, Ed Ruscha, James Rosenquist, and
Robert Barry
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Each year, my studio on Union Square, Richard Haymes Design Inc, won major national communications design awards. The greatest recognition we received, however, was the inclusion into 
the Permanent Design Collection of The Museum of Modern Art, a poster I designed for a Dan Flavin exhibition at the Leo Castelli Gallery.
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Through my work for Leo Castelli, I also got to serve as the graphic designer for the Estate of Joseph Cornell (represented by Castelli-Feigen-Corcoran). 
I had the opportunity to see and handle many of Cornell’s great masterpieces, including some that had never before been exhibited. xxxxxxxxxxxxx
My exposure to Cornell's work had a profound impact on my own design sensibilities and creative style. In 1992, on a four-month sabbatical in Paris, I began working on a series of 2-dimensional collages and miniature collaged books, as well as my earliest 3-dimensional construction pieces.
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I continued to build my own visual vocabularly by studying the artists and philosophies of the DADA and Surrealist movements--particularly the works of Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray, Max Ernst and Kurt Schwitters.
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I've never worked in a large format. From the very beginning, all of my works were small-scale pieces for two pragmatic reasons: (a) Paris's abundance of stationary stores that sell beautiful blank or engraved note cards and business cards made finding the perfect backgrounds for these pieces very accessible, and (b) the fact that I could only set up a very small workspace in the tiny apartment I was renting.
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I've never worked in a large format. From the very beginning, all of my works were small-scale pieces for two pragmatic reasons: (a) Paris's abundance of stationary stores that sell beautiful blank or engraved note cards and business cards made finding the perfect backgrounds for these pieces very accessible, and (b) the fact that I could only set up a very small workspace in the tiny apartment I was renting.
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My original paper collages were multi-layered and I often used discordent images to further skew a piece's context, e.g. if two out of three images in a piece are upside down, who decides whether it might not be better turned and displayed with only one image upside down--me or the viewer? This, in a way, made the viewer the artist, and the artist the viewer.
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The components of those pieces were made completely of Paris street-found objects [they just have much more interesting garbage than we do in the US!], and ephemera such as cancelled stamps, photographs, or images and text taken from newspapers and magazines. Upon my return from France, I was fortunate to have three successful New York City gallery exhibitions showing those first collages--two shows at The Joy Roy Gallery and one at The Ned Davies Gallery.
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Parallel to working on my art projects, in the late 1980s, I made a life-changing decision and walked away from the commercial art world to begin to focus my energies on AIDS-Related and Queer Community causes such as:
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People with AIDS Coalition~
Body Positive~
AIDS & Adolescents Network of NY~
Michael Callen-Audre Lorde
Comuunity Health Center~
NYC Gay & Lesbian Anti-Violence Project
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From 1986 to 1998, I worked as the Associate Executive Director of Callen-Lorde Community Health Center (formerly CommunityHealth Project). xxxxxxxxxxx
Next, from 1998 through 2005, I served as the Executive Director of the New York City Gay & Lesbian Anti-Violence Project, earning my masters degree from the Robert F. Wagner School of Public Administration at New York University in 1999.
xxxxxxxxxxxxx Sam Champion, me, Clarence Patton. Photo: Donna Aceto
In April 2005, however, after surviving HIV/AIDS since 1982, changes in my health status led me to resign my position at AVP and going on full time disability. Since then, I've devoted my time and energy to my personal healing. Part of my healing includes working on my art.
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Next, from 1998 through 2005, I served as the Executive Director of the New York City Gay & Lesbian Anti-Violence Project, earning my masters degree from the Robert F. Wagner School of Public Administration at New York University in 1999.
xxxxxxxxxxxxx Sam Champion, me, Clarence Patton. Photo: Donna Aceto
In April 2005, however, after surviving HIV/AIDS since 1982, changes in my health status led me to resign my position at AVP and going on full time disability. Since then, I've devoted my time and energy to my personal healing. Part of my healing includes working on my art.
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My experiences as a long term AIDS survivor, as well as having been an AIDS and community activist for over 20 years have strongly influenced my lifeview and my work.
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Re-contextualizing things that are most often overlooked, forgotten, passed by, or abandoned—candy wrappers, buttons, broken toys, rusty washers, etc.—holds a personal meaning for me because of the parallels I draw to society's similar response to the AIDS pandemic.
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The pieces ask viewers to re-examine objects that are familiar and every-day, but hardly ever considered. In their new context, they can project their own significance onto them—nostalgic, romantic, puzzling, sexualized, gender-bending, humorous, veuyeristic, horrific, ironic, etc.
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In Spring 2007, my newest works along with some earlier collages were exhibited in a group show called "Cloud Nine" in Jersey City. The other artists exhibited were Iris Kufert-Rivo, Mike Dawson, Janet Maya, Michael DeJong, and Henry G. Sanchez. xxxxxxxxxxxxx
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Most recently, I've been selected to parti-cipate in a special project for the Jersey City Museum. The program asks local artists to interpret a work of art from the museum's permanent collection, and then both are displayed together. My work will be displayed in September 2009.
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~Richard Haymes, 1 November 2007
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Richard Haymes
gossip4richard@yahoo.com
