John Harvey McCracken (1934-2011) was an American minimalist visual artist who worked in Los Angeles, where he settled in the late 1960s, and also in Santa Fe and New York. He trained as a painter at the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland, but soon moved his canvases toward three dimensions.
Around 1966 he developed his most recognizable form, the plank: a narrow, monochromatic, rectangular board that leans at an angle against the wall, somewhere between painting and object. He built them from plywood coated with fiberglass and polished polyester resin, using techniques related to surfboard construction. The bright, reflective color was an essential part of the work and echoed the California sun and car culture.
After a period of teaching at universities in California, Nevada and New York, his career revived in the mid-1980s. A retrospective at the Castello di Rivoli in Turin in 2011 was the major survey of his career. His legacy is visible in the presence of his works in museums such as the Guggenheim and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and in his association with the Light and Space movement.