Game+Fish

Date: 1988
 * [[image:http://ids.si.edu/ids/deliveryService?id=http://americanart.si.edu/images/1991/1991.61_2a.jpg&max=460 width="422" height="255" link="@http://americanart.si.edu/collections/search/artwork/?id=32281"]] || Title: **Game Fish**

Artist: **Larry Fuente** Born: Chicago, Illinois 1947

Medium: mixed media: wood, plastic, beads, buttons, poker chips, badminton birdies, ping pong balls, rhinestones, coins, dice, plastic figurines, combs, miniature pinball games, dominoes, chess pieces, pool balls, and other found objects Dimensions: 51 1/2 x 112 1/2 x 10 3/4 in. (130.8 x 285.6 x 27.3 cm) Smithsonian American Art Museum Gift of the James Renwick Alliance and museum purchase through the Smithsonian Institution Collections Acquisition Program

Accession: 1991.61 || Art of accumulation. Can get lost in details. Using a mounted sailfish trophy, Fuente created flamboyant work of art that is itself a punning play on words. The actual “game fish” is covered with a wide variety of commercial, game-related artifacts – dice, mini pin-ball games, poker chips, ping-pong balls, yo-yos, domino and Scrabble tiles, badminton birdies. Thousands of colored ornaments. Aesthetic of excess.- [Source: Notes from Curator-led Walk-Throughs in the Gallery and various Catalogs]
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Born in Chicago, Larry Fuente studied at the Kansas City Art Institute from 1967 to 1968, after which he followed friends to California. SInce the late 1960's, Fuente has concentrated on producing a body of work that is marked by an obsessive interest in surface ornamentation. He delights in covering readily identifiable forms with beads, plastic baubles, buttons and mass-produced items of no intrinsic value, transforming the mundane into unique objects.
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Size is no deterrent to Fuente, who once spent five years coating a 1960 Cadillac sedan with one million brightly colored beads, sequins, buttons, plastic lawn ornaments, and other items. Such works are related to a Latino popular-culture tradition in which automobiles and other objects are embellished with a profusion of brightly colored ornaments.

 Fuente Game Fish Info
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 14.3px; line-height: 1.5;">Artist Biography <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 14.3px;">SAAM Collections Page
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