ANDREWS, Oliver

[original in SCIF archives]

Oliver Andrews, Richard Diebenkorn and Bryan Wilson show at Stanford, 1960
[original in SCIF archives] /center>

2023
[original in SCIF archives]

ANDREWS, Oliver Wolcott (1925-1978) [SS#554-38-4795] , well-known artist and sculptor, professor at UCLA in the Art Department. Andrews drowned while scuba diving at Anacapa Island on September 30, 1978. He was 53 years old.

His sculpture, Seagull, of bronze, marble and wood, is next to the Anacapa Island bench in the Courtyard gallery of the Chrisman California Islands Center in Carpinteria, CA.

In the News~

October 2, 1978 [LAT]: “A body found floating in a cove near Anacapa Island off the coast of Port Hueneme Saturday has been identified as that of Oliver Andrews, 53, of Santa Monica, an art professor at UCLA. The Ventura County coroner's office said Andrew's body was brought to shore by a private boat. Officials said Andrews, who was scuba diving with two friends, was in the water preparing to dive but the current was rough and he was swept on to some rocks where he was stunned and apparently drowned as a result. An autopsy will be performed.”

October 8, 1978 [LAT]: “Oliver Andrews: In Memorium. California sculptor Oliver Andrews died Sept. 30. He drowned while skin diving with friends off Anacapa Island. Water was the element of his astrological sign. Water was the major element of his sculpture. This weekend, his ashes were scattered at sea. He felt an attachment to water that was virtually mystical. The late Times art critic Henry J. Seldis was an old friend and longtime champion. He called Andrews' work "calming and meditative."...”

September 1979 [UCLA In Memorium]: “Oliver Andrews was a sculptor, a dedicated artist who worked in many techniques, traditional and experimental, and with a continuous aesthetic persuasion based on man, nature, ritual, and vision. His love of the natural world brought him closest to the sea. He was an accomplished skin-diver and spent a great deal of his life in water. It was an important element in his work. He surrounded himself with its sound and its mystery. He created events for his submersible sculpture; fountains allowed water to fall in thin sheets over monolithic slabs of bronze or steel. At his death he was working on the design of an underwater communications center for interspecies exchange between humans, whales, and dolphins. Science, as well as art, was an engrossing challenge. It is then with tragic irony that Oliver lost his life in a skin-diving accident off the southern California coast in October, 1978. He was fifty-three.

Oliver was born in Berkeley, California, in 1925. He attended the University of California and Stanford University. During World War II, he served in Army communications in the Pacific theater. Oliver joined the art faculty at U.C.L.A. in 1958. He proved to have a strong and independent mind and a rare and special insight into those areas beyond the traditional wherein sculpture might go. Oliver was able to transmit these insights to his students and will be remembered as a dedicated and influential teacher. A success that can be attested to today by the numerous professional sculptors, teachers, and artists to whom he was not only teacher, but confidant, mentor, and friend. We think it can be said that the sculpture area of the U.C.L.A. art department was Oliver Andrews' sole creation. When the new Dickson Art Center was dedicated in 1965 the sculpture studios, as organized and planned by him, were recognized as the finest, most efficient facility of their kind. These studios were Oliver Andrews' kingdom. He worked there, spent most of his time there and from this base shared his knowledge of, and enthusiasm for, sculpture, its history and its unlimited formal possibilities. Through his writing, filming, and an untiring circle of exhibitions, lectures, symposia, and media interviews throughout the country, Oliver Andrews made important contributions to the history of sculpture and helped bring about the important role the sculptural arts achieved during the 1960s and continue to have to the present day.

Oliver Andrews had a rich and varied professional career. He had twenty-four one-man shows in galleries across the nation plus invitations to many group shows in museums and university galleries. He worked kinetically, with electricity, neon, water, and air. He was concerned with environments as works in themselves, not just as a background for individual pieces. In 1972 he created a forty-foot, helium-filled, mylar whale for a festival of the American Cetacean Society of which he was an enthusiastic member. He created “Sky Fountains” for the cities of Los Angeles, San Diego, and Cincinatti. He made presentations at several “Avant Garde Festivals” in New York City; floating giant mylar sculptures that filled Grand Central Station in 1973 and Shea Stadium and the World Trade Center in other years. At his death Oliver was just completing a major compilation of all that he knew about the art of sculpture. Living Materials, A Sculptor's Handbook, will be published posthumously by the University of California Press. The Wight Art Galleries at U.C.L.A. are preparing a memorial retrospective exhibition of his work. Oliver Andrews is survived by his wife Jill Fairchild Andrews, a son, Christopher, his mother, Mrs. Robert Hyde, and brothers, Joel Andrews and Gavin Hyde. To his family the University of California and the art faculty of the Los Angeles campus express deep sympathy. All of us who knew Oliver and worked with him feel a grave loss. His passing has created an absence, a void that was once abounding with life, vision, enthusiasm, generosity, and talent for all the good things he loved best in this world.