Palm Springs Museum, May 2024 —

Norman Zammitt exhibition titled Gradation filled the spacious city museum with light, and allowed us to be inside on a hot May day. The show runs from February 17 to October 6, 2024.

Zammitt’s early sculptures are laminated transparent plastic sheets with patterns that cause of prism effect. Much better in person than in photographs. They show the intensity of precision that Zammitt devoted to his work, from these pieces done in the mid-1960s to the graduated color paintings that seem from afar to be landscape, but are instead subject-less paintings of graduated color. A wall of small, intimate versions of these later painting looks boring from my photograph, but each one was like basking in the sun, without the discomfort of Palm Springs heat.

The lithograph (second to the last image) was printed at Tamarind Workshop that artist June Wayne began in Los Angeles in 1960. A decade after its founding, this lithography workshop moved to Albuquerque, New Mexico, and became part of the fine arts department at the University of New Mexico. This print lives in the archive of Tamarind Prints at the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth, Texas. The Carter Museum has popped up when I’ve been researching other shows or artists for their very deep archives.

Op Art was a happening thing in the late 60s, when Zammitt made these prints, which were derived from his work in plastic. A show like this one at the Palm Springs Museum helps me see how an artist develops and the distinctions made from one period to the next. I wasn’t around to know that he was one of the founding members (along with Larry Bell and Robert Irving) of the Light Art group in Southern California, as this show informed me. I was using plastics in junior high art classes, that’s to innovators like this guy. And then, to learn that he choose luminosity, rather than the op art patterning, as he continued to make art, mostly paintings, until his death in 2007.