Carson Grant - Pursuing Acting and Art Career

Pursuing Acting and Art Career

1970's Carson moved to New York City in 1970 to study acting technique with Lee Strasberg. He joined the professional acting unions: Screen Actors Guild, American Federation of Television and Radio Artists and Actors Equity Association; and was represented by the William Morris Agency who created the stage name 'Carson Grant'. He trained with Wally Harper, who coached his baritone voice, and Phil Black who trained him with modern jazz and fencing.

Grant perform various acting roles with New York City Opera and began his film acting career in films as Man on a Swing, The Front and Death Wish. He portrayed 'Romeo' in Romeo and Juliet at New Jersey Shakespeare in the Park and was young 'Thomas Jefferson' in The Last Ballot in the WNET 13 Bicentennial series.

Grant painted large oil canvases and constructed many art installations in alternative exhibition spaces as part of the East Village, Manhattan 1970s Art Movement, participating in Colab, Charas PS64 - El Bohio, ABC No Rio, Fashion Moda; and many group art shows in the East Village, the Westside, and the Bronx in alternative spaces. Leo Castelli recognized Carson's installation of living sand sculptures 'Coney Island Bathing Beauties' shown in the "The Coney Island Art Show 1980," and his triptych 'In Life Turmoil' in the "Time Square Show" 1980 organized by Collaborative Project Inc. Colab. Carson had a cobalt blue 'graffiti tag' of a pine tree coastline with his initials CFG, and on a midnight graffiti session, he had painted ten foot high cobalt blue Iris flowers stretching the block-long 100 foot wall on the lower eastside Con Edison plant, Avenue C and 14th Street, titled "Open your Irises", in protest of the pollution produced by the energy plant. Influenced by Robert Rauschenberg's use of art for social change, Carson's one-man exhibition was called "Nature-Nuclear" at the 1979 Jack Morris Gallery, NYC, where he constructed a large climb-up-into 'scarred Mother Earth Uterus' post nuclear with her next distorted generation traveling down her maimed fallopian tubes into her contaminated womb (30' x 40'), encouraged the viewer to consider alternative energy sources to protect our environment.

During this decade he helped establish the 'Westside Arts Coalition' with a group of multi-discipline upper westside artists at the Symphony Space to help establish exhibition spaces and affordable arts studios; and in 1981, as the WSAC group marched to Lincoln Center to protest President Reagan's budget cuts to the Arts documented by Grant's photographs appearing on the front page of the Westsider Newspaper,. In 1981 he organized a 'not-for-profit' art group called 'EAU' Environmental Artists United which created educational art exhibitions merging art and environmental conservation, which received grants from America the Beautiful Fund and Avon Foundation. Grant exhibited his artwork in alternative spaces throughout the boroughs of NYC, as one of the artists in the New York City 1970's and 1980's Art Movement.

Graduating as a Psi Chi Honors Sociey recipient in Psychology and elected Psi Chi president at CUNY - Hunter College BA program, Grant's master thesis on the Therapeutic Validity of Drama/Art Therapy, earned him an MA (Summa Cum Laude) at University of Connecticut, and postgraduate work at Columbia University. Grant presented his research at Georgetown's Drama Therapy Association 1985 convention.