Michael Leslie Brewster

Obituary for Michael Leslie Brewster Michael Brewster, artist and Claremont Graduate University professor who coined the term “acoustic sculpture” in 1970 to describe his passion for creating with sound, passed away June 19 in Los Angeles, among family and friends gathered for Father’s Day. He was 69. Michael was born in Eugene, Oregon on August 15, 1946 to Richard and Marian Burt Brewster. As a child, Michael’s family moved to Brazil, first to Curitiba, then Sao Paulo, where his father managed factories for a division of Borden Chemical. He graduated from the American Graded School of Sao Paulo, and returned to California to attend Pomona College. Brewster studied sculpture at Pomona and earned a bachelor’s degree in art there in 1968 before he enrolled in CGU’s MFA program, graduating in 1970. He started teaching at CGU’s Department of Fine Art in 1973, and on retirement in 2014, held the position of professor emeritus. Michael was the longest-serving faculty member in the Art Department. Brewster was a widely respected artist in California, nationally and internationally, who spent nearly 50 years pushing the perceptual boundaries of sculpture. Throughout his career, Brewster advocated the concept that sculpture is “an inner as well as a visceral awareness that evokes sensations in mind and body.” “His originality was that he treated sound sculpturally,” CGU art professor and art critic David Pagel said. “He made sound waves—impulses moving through the air that we can’t see, but which are really powerful, physical forces—even more physical. In Michael’s art, you really experienced sound in all its full-bodied, wraparound, immersive power.” “My means is sound, especially its effects; but my issues are sculptural, not musical,” Brewster wrote in his 1998 essay on sound sculpture “Where, There or Here.” “Sculpture, in its most expanded sense, is the mode of experience that I find truest . . . Sculpture should be a category of Experience, not a just a category of physical objects for us to ‘stand back and behold.’” Brewster’s work has been exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Orange County Museum of Art, the Santa Monica Museum of Art, MOCA Los Angeles, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art, and Artists Space in New York City, among other locations, as well as sites in Australia, Canada, Holland, Austria, and Italy. His works are in the permanent collections of the San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art, the Orange County Museum of Art, MOCA Los Angeles, and the Guggenheim Museum in New York City. His sound installations are on permanent public display in the Villa Panza in Varese, Italy. For some of his exhibitions, Brewster would position speakers to immerse visitors with cascading or colliding waves of sound that would “hit you in the gut,” Pagel said. “He made work that forced you to walk around in it,” he added. “There was no way to stand back and dispassionately or objectively take it in. You were in it.” Brewster was part of an illustrious group of artists whose works were included in It Happened at Pomona: Art at the Edge of Los Angeles 1969-1973, part of a 2012 Pacific Standard Time exhibition that was sponsored by the Getty Foundation. Over the decades, Michael was widely recognized for his immense talent as an artist and his nearly four decades of teaching and leadership at CGU. In 1988, he was named a fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. Brewster was the recipient of four Artist’s Fellowship Grants from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1976, 1978, 1984, and 1990, and a City of Los Angeles Artist’s Grant in 1996. Brewster was selected in 2010 as the first recipient of the Roland Reiss Endowed Chair in Art. During his early years at CGU, he worked alongside Reiss to build the department into an exceptional, nationally ranked program. Together, they revolutionized West Coast art education with the 1980 design of the campus Art building into a facility that provided each artist with their own dedicated studio space and functioned as an exhibit space—the East and Peggy Phelps Galleries—for more than three decades. In 2012, he was among seven influential, extraordinary Southern California artists who were interviewed for In Their Own Words: Oral Histories of CGU Art, an oral history exhibition. The exhibition examined Brewster’s (and others’) life and work, time spent at CGU, his emergence into the Los Angeles and international art scenes, and contributions to contemporary art. Michael lived in Venice, CA most of his adult life, among the many artists who changed Los Angeles’ place in the international art world. He is survived by his partner, Karen Anderson; his three daughters, Lily Asalde-Brewster Scholer, Miki Hamada Brewster and Camille Hamada Brewster; two grandsons, Joaquin and Silas Scholer (all of Los Angeles); brothers Mark Brewster of Tacoma, WA and Brian Brewster of San Diego, CA; and ex-wives Yrene Asalde and Cheryl Hamada of Los Angeles. He fought a rare cancer bravely for 18 months. Memorial services for Michael will be private.