Ed Bereal brings 'edgy' to Bellingham

The year is 2019, the place is the United States, and a black man walks into a foundry wanting to cast some bronze grenades.

This is how the American artist Ed Bereal, 82, recaps preparing for his first retrospective at the Whatcom Museum here.

Creating new work for his politically charged exhibition “WANTED: Ed Bereal for Disturbing the Peace” raised some eyebrows in this predominantly white coastal city 20 miles from Canada.

There was the foundry, Mr. Bereal said, where the staff was hesitant to serve him until a friend who happened to come in vouched for Mr. Bereal’s artistic intentions. And that was before Mr. Bereal had explained that the grenades would stand in as testicles in an installation about the apocalypse.

Ms. Leach said that Mr. Bereal is well known outside of Bellingham — perhaps most so for when he was living and working in Los Angeles, a time that included his assemblage pieces using bones, pipes and Nazi imagery; the 1961 exhibition “War Babies”; and the radical activist performance troupe the Bodacious Buggerilla, which performed in places that included laundromats and Richard Pryor concerts.

In Bellingham, however, people primarily know him as a retired Western Washington University art professor. In 1993, Mr. Bereal and his wife, the artist Barbara Sternberger, moved to Bellingham. They live on a farm with an art studio in Whatcom County.