Stainless steel, wood, leather, sewn cloth, and ammunition box
From scavenged metals and rags, Outterbridge constructed a “dancer” with “broken” appendages. The dancer sits splayed atop a box of ammunition retrofitted with an antenna so that it looks like a radio. The artist used discarded objects picked up off the streets of his South Central Los Angeles neighborhood to make this work. For Outterbridge, assemblage provided a direct means of becoming involved with his environment. “The work engaged part of the experience of the reinvention of things,” he explained.
2025
Gallery label from Take an Object , 2014
From scavenged metals and rags, Outterbridge constructed a “dancer” with truncated, or “broken,” appendages that sits, splayed, atop a box of ammunition retrofitted with an antenna so that it looks like a radio. The materials he used to make this work began as refuse—discarded objects picked up off the streets of his South Central Los Angeles neighborhood. For Outterbridge, assemblage provided a direct means of becoming involved with his environment. As he has explained, “The work engaged part of the experience of the reinvention of things.”
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Assemblage
A three-dimensional work of art made from combinations of materials including found or purchased objects.
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The Art of Assemblage
Gallery 408Everyday objects, popular consumer products, and other nontraditional materials had become, Seitz wrote, “the language for impatient, hypercritical, and anarchistic young artists,” who sought to create an art that—in its subject matter, materials, and making—was closely intertwined with life.
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