Rock Books
During the 1960s and 1970s, now living in obscurity, Shaver searched for physical evidence of the bygone prehistoric races. He claimed to find it in certain rocks, which he believed were "rock books" that had been created by the great ancients and embedded with legible pictures and texts. For years he wrote about the rock books, photographed them, and made paintings of the images he found in them to demonstrate their historic importance. He even ran a "rock book" lending library through the mail, sending a slice of polished agate with a detailed description of what writings, drawings, and photographs he claimed were archived by Atlanteans inside the stone using special laser-like devices.
Shaver never succeeded in generating much attention for his later findings during his lifetime, but there have been exhibits of Shaver's art and photographs in the years since his death. Artist Brian Tucker created an exhibition about Shaver's life and work in 1989 at California Institute of the Arts, and presented Shaver's work again in later years at the Santa Monica Museum of Art and the Guggenheim Gallery of Chapman University in Orange County, California. In 2009, Tucker curated "Mantong and Protong", an exhibition at Pasadena City College which pairs Shaver's work with that of Stanislav Szukalski. Shaver's art has also been exhibited in galleries in New York City, and in a traveling exhibition of "outsider photography" called "Create and Be Recognized" that originated at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco in 2004. In that exhibition, which toured the USA, Shaver's "rock book" photography was grouped with works by famous "outsider artists", including Henry Darger and Adolf Wolfli.
Read more about this topic: Richard Sharpe Shaver
Famous quotes containing the words rock and/or books:
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