After high school, he turned down a scholarship to the Illinois Institute of Technology, played basketball briefly at Miami University in Ohio and finally returned home to enroll at the School of the Art Institute, where he earned a B.A. in 1964 and an M.F.A. in 1966.
Four of his woven paintings were included in the exhibition “Twelve Chicago Painters” at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis in 1965. When he graduated, he was offered a teaching job at the Minneapolis School of Art (now the Minneapolis College of Art and Design), which, as he said in Bomb, “avoided a possible journey to the Mekong Delta.”
In 1968, while visiting from New York, the painter Don Nice saw Mr. Zucker’s work and offered him a job at the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan. Through Richard Serra, he found a loft, and through the artist Bob Israel, with whom he’d had a two-person show in Minneapolis the year before, he met Chuck Close. Eventually he met the dealer Klaus Kertess, who put him in a three-person show at Bykert Gallery in 1969, followed by other group and solo shows.
Over the years, Mr. Zucker also showed in New York with the gallerists Holly Solomon, Paul Kasmin, David Nolan, Mary Boone and others, as well as around the world. He was included in the Whitney Museum’s “New Image Painting” show in 1978 and in several biennials, and his work was collected by the Brooklyn Museum, the Jewish Museum in Manhattan, the Guggenheim, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art.
By the early 1980s, though, Mr. Zucker had had enough of the city, and he moved to East Hampton.
There, in addition to continuing his art practice, he spent many years volunteering as assistant basketball coach at Bridgehampton High School. He can be seen in that capacity in “Killer Bees,” a 2017 documentary about the school’s team.
Speaking to Mr. Close in Bomb, Mr. Zucker said, “I approach my body of work as a series of problems that are being solved within a certain framework.”
He added, “I rarely paint things that I like.”
