Fred Eversley, a sculptor who used a technique dating back to Isaac Newton to make otherworldly discs of tinted resin, died on March 14 in Manhattan. He was 83.
His death, in a hospital, was confirmed by his wife, Maria Larsson, who said that he died after a brief illness.
Mr. Eversley was a Brooklyn schoolboy of 12 or 13 when he first learned, from an issue of Popular Mechanics, that the centrifugal force created by spinning a vessel of liquid will push its surface into a parabola. Newton did this with a bucket and a rope; Mr. Eversley, working in his parents’ basement, used a pie plate of Jell-O on a turntable.
When he returned to the idea nearly three decades later, after giving up a career as an engineer, he was a fledgling sculptor in the busy artists’ community of Venice Beach, Calif., experimenting with plastics and dye. Using liquid polyester, which he called “the cheapest, the least toxic and the most transparent” resin available, he worked out a process for casting separate layers of resin colored violet, amber and blue in a spinning cylindrical mold.
The result was a form he stuck to for the next 55 years: a translucent disc, somewhat bigger than a vinyl record and much thicker, displayed vertically on a pedestal. Each disc has a highly polished parabolic concavity on one side that creates optical effects like a lens, sharpening and minimizing the view behind it. At the same time, the colors sparkle and change dramatically, according to the light in a given room and a viewer’s movements; as Mr. Eversley liked to say, it becomes a kind of kinetic sculpture without kinetic elements.
Over the years, Mr. Eversley produced opaque as well as translucent discs, worked at different scales, and made other parabolas by slicing through resin rings and tubes at sharp angles. Steadily successful at winning public commissions, he installed soaring curves of futuristic steel or glowing polyurethane at Miami International Airport, in West Palm Beach, Fla., and at the southern end of Central Park.
A charming and self-possessed man, he also acquired friends, mentors and patrons wherever he went. He used the sculptor Charles Mattox’s lathe to spin his first mold, was introduced to the gallerist Leo Castelli by Robert Rauschenberg and, according to his wife, became close friends with the influential collector Hans Heinrich Thyssen-Bornemisza after encountering him in an elevator.
Early on, he showed his work with other members of what became known as the Light and Space movement, an ethereal California spin on Minimalism. He was also associated with Finish Fetish, a movement that emphasizes new materials and the labor-intensive perfection of surfaces, and he was occasionally grouped with the Black Arts Movement, though some other Black artists found his work insufficiently political. (He made his first opaque disc after the sculptor John McCracken jokingly handed him a can of black pigment with which to make some “black art.”)
Still, with his engineering background, Mr. Eversley thought about what he was doing differently from how his peers did. His abiding interest was energy, in the scientific sense. And his abiding love was the only shape that, whatever hits it, whether light or sound, throws everything back into a single focal point: the parabola.
Frederick John Eversley was born in Brooklyn on Aug. 28, 1941. His father, Frederick William Eversley Jr., was a Barbados-born aerospace engineer and a contractor; his mother, Beatrice (Syphax) Eversley, taught at an elementary school.
In addition to his wife, he is survived by three younger siblings, Rani, Donald and Thomas Eversley.
As a child, Mr. Eversley liked to listen in on his father’s conversations with other engineers and to experiment with his grandfather’s camera equipment. He attended the progressive Camp Kinderland in Massachusetts; worked at the Folklore Center in Greenwich Village as a teenager as well as for his father’s aviation company; graduated from Brooklyn Technical High School; and met jazz greats like John Coltrane and Ella Fitzgerald at the Putnam Central Club, which his grandfather had founded, in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn.
He was the first Black man to live on campus at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, then known as the Carnegie Institute of Technology. In his senior year, the father of a fraternity brother offered him a job at Wyle Laboratories in El Segundo, Calif. He had already been accepted to medical school. But then he began dating a painting student with plans to spend the summer in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico.
“It’s a long story,” he recalled in a 2022 interview with the art historian Danielle O’Steen for the monograph “Fred Eversley: Parabolic Lenses,” “but my liberal parents suddenly turned on me and thought my idea was too wild. They refused to help out with money, so I figured the only way to spend the summer of ’63 in Mexico with Suzanne was to accept the job at Wyle and ask for advance payment.”
That fall he moved to Venice Beach and began running tests for NASA, private companies and the Department of Defense, like designing a special test chamber that bombarded the Apollo space capsule with high-intensity noise.
His plans were derailed again by a serious automobile accident in January 1967 that left him temporarily unable to work. By then he was surrounded by artists like James Turrell, whose studio was down the block; Richard Diebenkorn, whose studio was visible from his apartment; and Mr. McCracken, who moved in next door. Many of them came to him for help with engineering problems.
“Since I was on disability payment,” Mr. Eversley explained in the monograph, “I could play freely, without any pressure around staying out of the Army or making my living. I guess I felt like, if others can make art, I can, too. I really had nothing to lose.”
He started with photographic transparencies attached to the sides of plastic cubes illuminated by fluorescent bulbs. But soon, with the encouragement of friends like Mr. Mattox, John Altoon and Robert Rauschenberg, he dropped the photographs and focused on the plastic, casting and polishing luminous rectangles and cones. In 1969, when Mr. Altoon died, Mr. Eversley took over his studio, which had been designed by Frank Gehry.
Soon Mr. Eversley was enjoying a debut few artists could dream of. On a single day in 1970 he sold two pieces directly to the painter and influential gallerist Betty Parsons and was offered a solo show at the Whitney Museum of American Art by Marcia Tucker, with whom he had worked at the Folklore Center. That year he also had several solo shows at commercial galleries in New York, Chicago and Newport Beach, Calif., and appeared in more than a dozen group shows, including one at Pace Gallery in New York and one in Tokyo as well as several in California.
Despite this explosive beginning, for much of his career Mr. Eversley was, and had to be, his own best salesman. Fortunately, though he might have downplayed it, he had a talent for it.
“I really don’t believe, perhaps contrary to popular opinion, that my business techniques are that aggressive,” he said in a 1980 interview with Ocular magazine.
In 2018 he signed with David Kordansky Gallery, which has locations in Los Angeles and New York. The next year, after a yearslong dispute with his Venice Beach landlord, he returned to New York, where he owned a five-story loft building in SoHo. In 2023 Kordansky staged his first New York solo show since 1976, “Fred Eversley: Cylindrical Lenses.” For that show, he made a series of brilliantly colored seven- to nine-foot-tall monoliths, realizing an idea he first had decades earlier. Amanda Gluibizzi described them in The Brooklyn Rail as “megalithic and space-age at the same time.”
Shortly before his death, said Ms. Larsson, an artist and architect who also managed her husband’s studio, Mr. Eversley was talking about what a charmed life he had had. If he did, it must have been at least partly because he came forward so eagerly to meet every opportunity.
“Fred showed up,” Ms. Larsson said. “He showed up everywhere. He used to say, ‘Maria, we need to show up.’”
