Sewing in the sixties: recounting how some classic examples of Claes Oldenburg's Pop sculpture came into existence, with cameo appearances by Dick Bellamy, Dennis Hopper and Charlie the cat - Memoir - Excerpt

Art in America, Nov, 2002 by Patty Mucha

After his L.A. show, Claes began to focus on an exhibition at Sidney Janis, "Four Environments by Four New Realists," with George Segal, Jim Dine and James Rosenquist. For it, C.O. produced a complete bedroom suite, the kind one might see pictured in a newspaper advertisement. Come to life, the flattened two-dimensional perspective rendering of furniture in a room was transposed into a realistic three-dimensional setting. A bed, chair and dresser set, constructed in a rhomboidal rather than rectangular format, were placed within one of the Janis Gallery's rooms, cordoned off from the viewers by a rope like a diorama in a natural history museum. The piece needed to be seen from a fixed point of view.

The bedroom set, covered in black-and-white vinyl; the dresser set, built from cobalt-blue marbled Formica; a chair upholstered in cheap velour in a black-and-white zebra pattern, hard as a rock, had all been contracted out to a Los Angeles carpenter who made the angles sharp and pronounced in the chosen slanted line. My job was sewing the white vinyl pillows and some fuzzy fake-fur throw pillows, a fluffy scatter rug, and a leopard-print woman's coat that was tossed on the bed, complete with an oversized clutch bag of shiny black vinyl. I also made some pink and white stuffed-cotton chunks that were meant to suggest clothing protruding from open dresser drawers. Tacky framed wallpaperlike prints--a tribute, this time, to Pollock--were hung against the ever constant "Janis gray" walls. Claes, so keen on details, would use this color (which he normally detested on gallery walls) to its full advantage.

The actual room of the gallery had been measured months before, so the bedroom set fit perfectly in it. Seeing myself as a part of the room, I sewed a tight sheath dress from electric turquoise fabric that had a hairy-fringed surface, and presented Sidney with a bow tie I had made from silver vinyl. It was a fun opening. After a week we returned to Linnie Canal to continue work until April, at which point we'd come back to New York City for Claes's one-man show at Janis.

It was hard for me to leave California. I had enjoyed being there for lots of reasons. But the trip cross-country made the journey back interesting. We wasted no time, preparing for the show at Janis en route. One of the pieces was Green Beans. These beans resembled the wide Italian variety. Sewn from a rich green vinyl, the outside sleeves each measured about 16 inches long. Inside there were identically formed white bean seeds: poured Hydrocal hardened from a rubber mold that Claes had designed. About 5 inches long, they fit nicely in one's hand. Each seed required some sanding, so whoever wasn't driving spent time rubbing them down with fine sandpaper. A studio inside a moving car? Yup. Cough. Cough. White dust was everywhere.

When we got to New York, we no longer had an apartment to go to, so after staying a week in a truly raunchy motel across the Hudson in New Jersey, we took a room in the Chelsea Hotel. This "artist's hotel" on West 23rd Street had a lobby full of art given to the proprietor, often in lieu of rent. Taking the elevator to our simple room would bring us into contact with the more colorful inhabitants. Larry and Clarice Rivers were staying in a three-room suite with their infant, Gwynne. And a small assortment of European artists came and went.