About

Glenn Grubbs – Artist Biography

Glenn Grubbs is a visual artist whose work merges painting, poetry, and structural inquiry into a personal and philosophical exploration of memory, perception, and the residues of lived experience. Born in Washington, DC, Grubbs was shaped early by frequent visits to the city’s world-class museums, sparking a lifelong engagement with art as both reflection and inquiry.

He earned a BFA in Painting and an MArch in Architecture from Arizona State University, disciplines that converge in his distinctive approach—structurally aware, materially sensitive, and formally experimental. Over a career spanning more than 30 years, Grubbs has developed a visual language that draws on influences ranging from early exposure to modernism, time spent living in postwar West Germany as a soldier in the U.S. Army, and nearly two decades of public service—most recently as Deputy Public Works Officer for the Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center in Twentynine Palms, California—where he applied his architectural creativity to real-world challenges of process, form, and function.

Grubbs’ paintings often incorporate bold, glyph-like forms and black linear frameworks that recall stained glass or ancient symbolic systems, suggesting thresholds between seen and unseen, said and unsaid. His works are neither purely representational nor wholly abstract; they operate in a liminal zone where tension, resonance, and the unresolved are held in dynamic equilibrium. Drawing on ideas such as melete (meditative practice), mnamē (active memory), and aoidē (song or invocation), his process is as much about inquiry as it is about expression—an art of making that unfolds as a sustained dialogue between gesture, material, and meaning.

Now based in California near Joshua Tree, Grubbs continues to create work rooted in specific experiences yet open to broader interpretation. His current practice includes poetic tensegrity sculptures, hybrid forms combining carved woodblocks and tensile elements, and a growing body of paintings exploring the emotional and spatial architecture of memory.

Commenting on his background, Grubbs said, “having been formally trained as both an Artist and Architect, I’m inspired by my personal experiences. I have a passion for experimentation and creativity and enjoy developing novel solutions that shape the visual language of my art.”

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