Marty Greenbaum (1934 in New York City – 2020) was an American painter, mixed media assemblage and book artist.
Greenbaum is best known for his mixed media assemblage, painting and artist books[4][5] “At a time when most of his contemporaries were calculating how to harden their edges or revamp their styles with the window dressings of Camp, this primal mixed media whizkid from Coney Island labored like an entranced shaman, to conjure up zanily beautiful art brut paintings and weird, wax-drizzled voodoo alter assemblages that resembled nothing so much as the ritual artifacts of some lost psychedelic tribe!”[6] Greenbaum appeared in three films: Hallelujah the Hills in 1963 by Adolfas Mekas,[7][8][9] Life Dances On,[10][11] in 1980 by Robert Frank, and The Present in 1996 by Robert Frank.
[12] Greenbaum authored his own happenings, i.e. Coney Island Carny, including artists such as Eddie Barton, Remy Charlip, Paul Kaplow, Paul Krasner, Al Hanson, Ed Blair, Allen Ginsberg, John Hamond, Eddie Rabkin, Lou Gosset, Renee Renee, Allan Kaprow, Phyllis Yampolsky, Thomas Hoving, Jackie Ferrara, Peter Schumann, Jim Bell, Bill Marshall, Corla Lopez, Bruce Waite, and Mark di Suvero,[13] as well as organizing the Hall of Issues[14][15] with Phyllis Yampolsky at The Judson Memorial Church.
Today, he makes fetishistic notebooks filled with colored paper and scribbled equations, accretions of feathers and Rhoplex.
By the time of 'In '84 Returned in 2004' I was cutting out shapes and opening up areas in the pages of a finished or an empty book.