NADA Miami 2023

John McIntire’s “River Man”, is a sculpture that functions as a working fountain. The work describes the memory of carefree parties in the early 1960’s on the banks of the Mississippi River where one of McIntire’s friends, a well known poet, especially liked to take his clothes off and perform his “human fountain” method. It also depicts a time and place before the counterculture was fully co-opted by the corporate hegemony. McIntire’s memories inform this work that is very much about his heyday in the 1960s and 70s when he was at the center of a creative demimonde in Memphis, Tennessee.