My approach to The Paul McCobb Living Museum…

I take on many roles. In artist garb, I might present the entire work as a curatorial-sculpture. I’ll equally play archivist or historian. But the working title that feels like it fits the best, is that of conceptual-archaeologist.

I’ve been mining McCobb’s works for the last eighteen years. The entire process has felt like an excavation of sorts—digging through a variety of cultures; like piecing together an as-yet unseen creature of both form and idea. The museum is like an archaeological-site, but in reverse—wherein discoveries from near and far have been brought to a single place, to build a singular picture that has not otherwise been seen. It is also my home.

When I first started collecting, scant information existed about McCobb or his Planner Group creation. I had no plan, but what I found in the first few years both rapt my attention and signaled something much larger. In parallel, I assembled an archive of documentation—essential clues in both the attribution and history building process.

Slowly, a complete picture of McCobb’s Planner Group came into view—and along with it, McCobb’s contribution to the history of American design and creativity.

I liken the project to a living-artifact—an allegory of a not-too-distant time-zone wherein the grand narratives of modernism waned, as a new “contemporary” mode of expression emerged. McCobb had a central effect in this changing time. His Planner Group holds this zeitgeist shift in its very bones.

— Yogi Proctor, 2023.