Clark Richert

American artist (1941–2021), a founder of Drop City — the 1960s Colorado art commune famous for its geodesic domes and "zomes" — and a painter whose work explored geometric pattern, symmetry, and aperiodic tiling.

Richert's practice spanned painting, animation, video, happenings, and publishing, but he is best remembered for co-founding Drop City near Trinidad, Colorado in 1965, where residents built domed structures from car tops and scrap. His paintings pursued the same geometric preoccupations — polyhedra, quasicrystalline symmetry — that ran through the dome movement, and he is regarded as one of Colorado's most important artists.

Role in Fuller's orbit

Richert is a direct heir of Fuller's geometry in its countercultural, owner-builder phase: Drop City took the geodesic dome out of the patent office and onto the mesa. He worked alongside Steve Baer, whose zome geometry grew from the same milieu, in the world the Whole Earth catalog and We Are All Astronauts document.

See Also

• Steve Baer (Steve Baer) — Drop City collaborator and originator of the zome
• We Are All Astronauts (We Are All Astronauts) — account of Fuller's legacy in which the Drop City dome-builders figure
• Drop City (Drop City) — the dome commune he co-founded

Sources

• Clark Richert (source reference) — Zotero People collection (Wikipedia entry)