2007 Bobby Furst All Rights Reserved
Bobby Furst was born Robert Saint Knowles the Third on Long Island, New York in 1953. In 1955 he and his mother moved to Los Angeles, California. In 1959, after his mother remarried to documentary filmmaker Peter Furst they moved to Laurel Canyon in the Hollywood Hills. In the early 1960's Bobby would roam the canyons and trails collecting sticks, stones, bones, etc. Walking to school on Thursday mornings he would raid the local trashcans and stow his finds in bushes to be taken home later that day.
Making order out of the chaos of these castoffs was the beginning of a life long pursuit of collecting stuff and assembling art.
As a tenager in the late sixties he wanted to become a photojournalist after accompanying his father, now an anthropologist and art collector, to Tepic Mexico where Peter documented the life and visionary art of the Huichol Indians. In the 1970's Bobby spent time photographing musicians and concerts, street people in Hollywood and Venice Beach, and went on location to Mata Ortiz, Mexico for a month to document the now famous potter Juan Quesada (in the late nineties those photographs accompanied a retrospective of Juan Quasada's work at the Museum of Man in San Diego, California.)
In 1998 he went with a friend to the studio of assemblage artist George Herms. Soon after, at a garage sale, he met a painter attending the Santa Monica College of Design Art and Architecture who mentioned that George Herms taught there and that classes began the next day. Since admission to the school was by the adminstrations' approval of an artist's portfolio, Bobby arrived the next day with art work in hand hoping to get into Georges' class. Bobby spent the next year and a half, ten hours a day, seven days a week creating art at his studio space at the school. more....click next
