Exhibitions
Art History & Culture
ADRIAN GREEN (1925 – 2016)
Born in rural Lindsay, California, to Eugene and Mable Green, Adrian was a descendant of Nathan Dillon, one of Tulare County’s first settlers. His grandfather, Joseph Cornelius Green, purchased a section of land in Three Rivers in the early 1900s, where Adrian would later reside. He spent much of his early youth with his family in the high mountains of the Sierra Nevada, escaping the oppressive summer heat. Green graduated from Visalia High School (present-day Redwood High School) and College of the Sequoias. He then spent two years in military service during the war with the U.S. Navy.
Green’s higher education consisted of a major in art at the University of California at Berkeley, where he earned his B.A. He studied under the pioneer of art education, Henry Schoefer Simmern, while he was a student, and assisted in some of his children’s classes.
My life has had its share of suffering and pain, but what I will always remember is its wonderful gifts. When you have such a harmonic conjunction of timing and grace, one’s wholeness is a work of art itself.
In 1948, Adrian visited Mexico and returned there in 1949 for ten months, studying at the Art Institute at San Miguel de Allende. Pre-Columbian art had a profound effect on him during this time, causing him to shift from an aspiring painter to a budding sculptor. For the next 50 years, he worked almost entirely in stone, mainly granite and dolomite. His two-dimensional artwork utilized watercolor, pencil, glass etchings, and pastels.
Local works include a spouting granite fish at Reimer’s Candy Store, the Three Rivers Arts Center amphitheater, and the signature piece at Saint Anthony’s Retreat, a baptismal font-turned-fountain located at the entrance of the retreat.
Green completed on-site commission work in the United States, as well as in Switzerland and France, including an aluminum horse for Allied Aluminum Corporation and a home in Malibu designed by architect John Lautner featuring 120 granite boulders. Privately collected works are in San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, Belgium, Switzerland, France, and Sweden.
Numerous sculptures are on the grounds of the Ann Ree Colton Foundation of Niscience in Glendale, California, including a bronze “Joseph and the Baby Jesus.” His work in Merida, Mexico, the one-ton ”2012 Spiritual Rising,” was placed in Three Rivers for permanent placement prior to his death. Its creation was a spiritual experience that motivated him to take several trips back to the Yucatan.
During Green’s final years, he continued his sculptural endeavors at his studio home and workshop by the Kaweah River in Three Rivers, California, where his interest in creating sacred art remained a constant.
