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Kinji Akagawa
Siah Armajani
Deborah Butterfield
Ann Carlson
Tony Cragg
Chuck Davis
Jackie Ferrara
Frank Gehry
Dan Graham
Brower Hatcher
Jene Highstein
Ellsworth Kelly
Philip Larson
Liz Lerman Dance Exchange
Sol LeWitt
Atelier van Lieshout
Mario Merz
David Nash
Claes Oldenburg & Coosje van Bruggen
Martin Puryear
George Segal
Judith Shea
Elizabeth Streb/Ringside
Sarah Sze
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Garden Commissions |
 Garden Seating, Reading, Thinking, 1987 granite, basalt, cedar 45 x 144 1/2 x 40 in. In memory of Elizabeth Decker Velie, 1988 Born in Tokyo and working in Minneapolis since the 1960s, Kinji Akagawa combines the elegant simplicity of Japanese aesthetics with a deep concern for the impact of art on public places. He strives to invite private activities such as reading, thinking, and even writing into the "street" furniture he creates and incorporates common, local materials into their context. The bench he created for the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden combines unfinished green basalt from Minnesota, a vertical base of highly polished granite from South Dakota, and a horizontal slab of cedar that recalls forests from the region's past. The three elements retain their separate and unique characteristics as they combine to create an elegant whole that invites us to rest, read, and reflect in the Garden. More Information
 Irene Hixon Whitney Bridge, 1988 steel, wood, paint, concrete, brass length: 379 ft. Gift of the Minneapolis Foundation/Irene Hixon Whitney Family Founder-Advisor Fund, the Persephone Foundation, and Wheelock Whitney, with additional support and services from the Federal Highway Administration, the Minnesota Department of Transportation, the City of Minneapolis, and the National Endowment for the Arts, 1988 Twin Cities-based artist Siah Armajani is known for his pioneering public works, which have helped to redefine the social function of art both in this country and abroad. More than simply art for public spaces, Armajani's bridges, plazas, and other public art pieces--at once utilitarian and symbolic--are intended to reflect the ideals of a democratic society and to foster discourse and learning in the communities they inhabit. Armajani explored the bridge as a metaphor for passage in a number of his early conceptual models and works. In 1970, for example, for the exhibition 9 Artists/9 Spaces, he fashioned an 85-foot-long, rough-timbered wooden bridge. Rising quite surprisingly to a gabled peak at its middle, it sheltered a lone pine tree planted beneath. The idea of passage became decidedly more functional with Armajani's full-scale commission forthe Irene Hixon Whitney Bridge, which allows pedestrians to cross the sixteen lanes of streets and highway that had severed the Garden from neighboring Loring Park for many years. The artist's design incorporates the three basic types of bridge structure: beam (across its fir-planked, horizontal span), arch (for the eastern portion), and suspension (for the western portion). To underscore the sense of transition from one part to the next, Armajani painted each half a different, atmospheric shade: pale blue for the upward arching portion and yellow, recreated from the hue that Thomas Jefferson used at his home, Monticello, for the inverted arch. Affixed to the upper lintel of the span and running in each direction across the bridge are the words of a poem--a meditation on movement, place, order, and crossing--which Armajani commissioned specially from the renowned American poet John Ashbery. More Information
 Woodrow, 1988 bronze 99 x 105 x 74 in. Gift of Harriet and Edson W. Spencer, 1988 Deborah Butterfield, who owns, rides, and trains horses on her ranch in Montana, has likened the act of "building" a horse through training to the creative process of building her sculptures. Since the early 1970s, Butterfield has been creating magnificently observed, highly individualized horses from a diversity of found materials--fragments of wood, wire, scrap metal, mud, brick dust, and straw. Woodrow is something of a technical tour de force. Butterfield took a selection of sticks, tree branches, and bark, cast each element individually in bronze, and then assembled and welded the pieces together to create the stately beast. Each element was then patinated to create the look of the original sticks and branches. The trompe l'oeil effect is so convincing that many visitors to the Garden believe the piece is actually made of wood. More Information
 Dead, September 1989 To mark the first anniversary of the opening of the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden, the Walker presented a series of free outdoor performances in the Garden. Featured was music by Rufus Harley (the world’s first jazz bagpipe player), IMP ORK (the Twin Cities’ 30-member improvisational orchestra), and dances by Elizabeth Streb/Ringside and the University of Minnesota Dance Department. Closing out the celebration was the world premiere of Dead, a large-scale, two-part work by choreographer/performance artist Ann Carlson. This was the final segment of her “Animals” series; she has used goats, dogs, cats, goldfish, and gorillas as part of her process, along with archetypal figures such as lawyers and professional athletes and everyday citizens. A Walker-commissioned performance piece, Dead included 100 performers and a white horse named Lhadi, and was described by Carlson as a “living sculpture,” fusing movement, voice, sound, and color. The piece was developed in a series of visits by the artist, in conjunction with local community members that Carlson helped recruit. According to then Performing Arts Curator John Killacky, “She transcends the personal qualities of her performers, people, and animals. She takes lawyers but puts them in a context where they go beyond being lawyers. It can often be very beautiful and poignant, a transcendence of the boundaries of being a person” (Star Tribune). For Dead, Carlson asked local performers to act as themselves, whispering their own stories and observations as they gathered in the Garden. The critical mass of bodies acted as a visual metaphor for life; Carlson on the horse was a startling symbol of hope and transition into the afterlife as they wandered in and through the throng of bodies. The second half of the work, called Embedded, took place later that evening in the Walker Auditorium, and entailed more unusual material--two vocalists and a carefully constructed bed holding 700 pounds of dirt in which the artist was buried.  Ordovician Pore, 1989 granite, steel 96 x 90 x 124 in. overall Gift of Joanne and Philip Von Blon, 1989 Trained as a scientist, Tony Cragg creates art that investigates the natural world. Yet if his sculptures comment on such topics as molecular structure, the human vascular system, or the Newtonian light spectrum, it is his use of man-made forms (either found or constructed) that transforms them into complex meditations on contemporary life. Here Cragg has constructed steel elements on a granite base--two smooth-surfaced concave cylindrical forms and two elemental biomorphic shapes--that comment on the Ordovician geological era of 500 million years ago, when oxygen was introduced into the atmosphere. While the oxygen gave rise to terrestrial life, it simultaneously killed off the species of algae that had produced it. The close resemblance of the cylinders to the cooling towers of nuclear power plants perhaps suggests an analogous life-death conundrum for our own technological age. More Information
 Babu's Magic, July 1994 Chuck Davis, a teacher-dancer-choreographer from Durham, North Carolina, is one of the masters of African dance in the United States. Davis and company members participated in an extended residency over the course of a 10-month period, during which time they held community workshops, lecture demonstrations, and master classes in schools, neighborhood parks, and at community centers. The culmination of this residency was the performance of Babu’s Magic, co-commissioned by the Walker Art Center. Using music, dance, and song to tell a traditional African folktale, this community-based performance featured African drummer Linda Thomas-Jones and approximately 90 Twin City residents, including singers, dancers, musicians, and non-artists of all races and ages who had participated in Davis’ residency activities. The Garden was transformed into a village setting for the performance, and performer wore dazzling West African costumes as they danced to the fast-paced rhythms of African drumming, The African folktale upon which Babu’s Magic is based tells the story of a deaf girl ostracized from her village and befriended by the animals in a sacred forest. When she returns to the village, she saves the people from an epidemic and is heralded for her healing powers. Davis used this folktale as the basis for his project because it stresses the universal importance of family and community unity. He believes that understanding one another is the key to healing communities plagued by violence and hate. The chant that pervades this performance is “Peace, love, respect for everybody!”  Belvedere, 1988 cedar 126 x 506 x 407 in. Gift of the Butler Family Foundation, 1988 A belvedere--"beautiful view" in Italian--is a structure built to command a view of its surroundings. Jackie Ferrara's stylized architectural work for the Garden holds court in the southwest corner of the grounds, where it serves as a reception, performance, and seating area for visitors as well as an object of contemplation. Ferrara's sculptures, whether tabletop sized or of grander scale, are exquisitely crafted meditations on timeless architectural forms. Here, the pylons laid out on a T-shaped floor plan suggest an Egyptian temple. The solid, elemental geometry of the piece contrasts with the delicacy of its surfaces, where complex patterns emerge from the varying lengths and shades of wood and from the play of light and shadow that embellishes the interior spaces. More Information
 Standing Glass Fish, 1986 wood, glass, steel, silicone, Plexiglas, rubber 264 x 168 x 102 in. Gift of Anne Pierce Rogers in honor of her grandchildren, Anne and Will Rogers, 1986 Ever since visitors watched its miraculous birth in the Walker's lobby--pieced together scale by scale by artisans for the exhibition of Frank Gehry's work here in 1986--the Standing Glass Fish has become a beloved icon in the city's cultural life. The 22-foot creature waited two years before being carefully disassembled and transported across the street to its permanent habitat: a fantastic lily pond among the Mexican fan palms and calamondin orange trees of the crystalline Cowles Conservatory. One of the most innovative architects practicing today, Gehry is known for using ordinary materials such as raw plywood and chain-link fencing in his boldly artistic designs. The new Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, and the striking Frederick R. Weisman Art Museum here in Minneapolis are two recent examples of his unique architectural vision. The figure of the fish--a fond remembrance of the giant carp his Jewish grandmother would leave swimming in the bathtub each week to use for her Friday-night gefilte fish--has been a recurring motif in Gehry's work. He has used it for his whimsical lamps, in the design for a conference room, and as a notational element in his architectural drawings. More Information
 Two-way Mirror Punched Steel Hedge Labyrinth, 1994-1996 stainless steel, glass, arborvitae 508 x 206 5/16 x 90 in. overall Gift of Judy and Kenneth Dayton, 1996 Since the mid-1960s, conceptual artist Dan Graham has been investigating how spaces affect human behavior, how art and audiences are connected, and how works of art are linked to their physical, social, and economic contexts. His works have included color photographs of suburban tract homes; interactive perfor-mances, films, and video installations; and glass and mirror pavilions, which he has been making for more than twenty years. For the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden he has created a large geometric maze with walls that provide both transparent and reflective surfaces. As we interact with the sculpture we both see and are seen, view the surrounding environment and our own reflections. The piece conjures up questions about inside and outside, about public and private spaces, and--as the reflective surfaces respond to the motion of clouds and sun--about nature and culture. More Information
 Prophecy of the Ancients, 1988 cast stone, stainless steel, steel, bronze, aluminum, ceramic height: 202 in.; diameter: 246 in. Gift of the Lilly family, 1989 Brower Hatcher was trained in engineering and industrial design before he turned to sculpture in the early 1970s. In his stone and steel-mesh sculpture for the Garden, he melds the logic of an engineer with a visionary's impulse to transcend time and space. A futuristic dome, composed of thousands of flexible wire polyhedrons, rests atop six mock-Egyptian columns in a blend of ancient and modern architectural styles. Embedded within the structure and seeming to hover in space are an assortment of common objects and abstract forms: a table, a ladder, a chair, a turtle (whose patterned shell recalls the gridded structure of the dome), random letters, numbers, discs, and dashes. Hatcher offers up these private symbols for universal interpretation, as viewers are inspired to construct their own meanings from the galaxy of images suspended above them. More Information
 Untitled, 1987-1988 granite three elements: 108 x 48 x 28 in.; 75 x 61 x 43 in.; 30 x 90 x 51 in. Acquired with funds provided by Martha and John Gabbert, Joanne and Philip Von Blon, and the National Endowment for the Arts, 1989 Jene Highstein studied philosophy, painting, and drawing before turning to sculpture in the late 1960s, applying cement over steel frames to create the large, rounded shapes--mounds and spheres--that interested him. When he finally began to carve in stone around 1980, he was able to explore new aspects of these forms. The three massive monoliths that form the work in the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden were shaped from Pennsylvania granite, scored with a diamond-tipped circular saw, and then chiseled to expose the crystalline structure of the stone. Although they might at first appear to be objects found in nature, primitive totems arranged by tribal worshipers, or even meteors cast from the skies, they are, in fact, carefully crafted works intended to provoke a range of associations regarding nature and culture. More Information
 Double Curve, 1988 bronze two elements: 216 x 40 x 4 1/2 in. each Gift of Judy and Kenneth Dayton, 1988 While Ellsworth Kelly is perhaps best known for his abstract paintings--canvases with sharply delineated areas of bold, flat color laid out in pure geometric shapes--the sculptures he has made throughout his career explore many of the same issues regarding form and space. The two eighteen-foot, gently curving bronze arcs of Double Curve are insistently two-dimensional (viewed from the side, they almost disappear). Like the flat shapes in his paintings, they depend on their precisely controlled relationship to each other and to the surrounding area for their impact and surprising complexity. Viewing the surfaces themselves--rich brown in the morning light, stark black silhouettes in the midday sun--the arcs seem to be bending toward one another; viewing the shapes between or around the arcs, a new vibrancy of space, in rhythm with the surrounding landscape, emerges. More Information
 The Six Crystals, 1988 granite, iron 18 3/8 x 104 x 28 in. Gift of Dr. Michael Paparella, 1988 Trained as an art historian, Philip Larson turned to art-making in the early 1970s. In his sculptures andprints, he frequently incorporates geometrical patterns that are inspired by architectural forms--especially the building ornamentation of Chicago and Prairie School architects such as Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright. In the bench he designed for the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden, Larson explores progressive permutations of basic geometric forms. The cast-iron components of the piece represent the six possible combinations of four irregular diamond shapes dervied from rock crystals. Larson has also created such public projects as the walkway system for General Mills and the etched-glass transit shelters along Nicollet Mall in downtown Minneapolis. More Information
 Hallelujah/Minneapolis: In Praise of Beauty and Disorder, June 2001 On Father’s Day of 2001, Liz Lerman Dance Exchange presented as its culminating artist-in-residence performance Hallelujah/Minneapolis: In Praise of Beauty and Disorder, a celebration incorporating dance, theater, music, and storytelling performances by Dance Exchange company members, local artists, and community groups throughout the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden. The piece opened with a blessing/performance by the company that set the stage for an afternoon of discovery--visitors were encouraged to explore the Garden and experience a multitude of uniquely staged mini-performances and participate in interactive opportunities. A grand finale by the assembled dancers closed an unforgettable afternoon. Since 1976, choreographer-cultural activist Liz Lerman has been a national pioneer in defining ways that innovative art-making can be linked intrinsically to community-building. For this project, she proposed a radical redefinition of artistic hierarchies: democratizing the art-making process and constructing creative and equitable relationships between visiting and local artists, veteran and first time performers, presenter and creator, artist and community. One of the largest and most complex residency initiatives the Walker has supported in recent years, Hallelujah/Minneapolis involved a series of visits to plan cooperative work with community organizations, local artists, Walker staff, and copresenting partners. Hallelujah/Minneapolis: In Praise of Beauty and Disorder was one of 15 Hallelujah projects conducted in cities across the country between 2000 and 2002. This national initiative in performance, praise, and participation engaged all kinds of people to create a series of dance-theater works “in praise of” topics vital to their host communities. In Minneapolis, as participants began to explore the idea of celebration within the jumble of everyday living, “Beauty and Disorder” emerged as the key theme. Participants in Lerman’s artist residency in the Twin Cities included Art and Religion in the Twin Cities; Association of Advancement of Hmong Women in Minnesota; the Cathedral Basilica of Saint Mary; Jeremiah Program; Sheridan Global Arts and Communications School; Southwest Senior Center; North High School; St. Paul Jewish Community Center; Rimon, the Jewish Metropolitan Council on the Arts; United Theological Seminary; Young Dance; and individual artists and community members. Liz Lerman Dance Company’s Hallelujah/Minneapolis: In Praise of Beauty and Disorder was commissioned by the Walker Art Center especially for the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden and was developed in partnership with the Walker, Minnesota Dance Alliance, and Intermedia Arts.  X with Columns, 1996 cinder block, concrete 168 x 312 x 312 in. Partial gift of the artist with funds provided by the Judy and Kenneth Dayton Garden Fund; materials provided by Anchor Block Company, 1996 Conceptual artist Sol LeWitt has been well known since the 1960s for his sculpture, graphics, and wall drawings. An example of his cubic, modular sculpture is installed on the Walker's roof terrace, and his Four Geometric Figures in a Room can be seen on the walls of the museum's lower lobby. Concepts or ideas are the basic materials of LeWitt's art, which often exists as a set of detailed instructions. As with a musical score or architectural blueprint, the realization of the final work is relegated to others. LeWitt uses the most neutral of materials--here, commercial cinder blocks--and rigorously deploys them in basic geometric configurations. Both the materials and forms he uses intentionally lack any expressive qualities in themselves. They are rather like "grammatical devices" in language, which take on significance only throughtheir combination with one another in actual use. Like David Nash's Standing Frame, LeWitt's X with Columns provides frames through which views of the surrounding landscape are visible. More Information
 The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, 1998 mixed-media installation Commissioned with Funds provided by the Medtronic Foundation. Additional support provided by the Mondriaan Foundation and the Judy and Kenneth Dayton Garden Fund, 1998 "In comparison with many other artworks, the work of Atelier van Lieshout is simple, straightforward, and is no-nonsense. It leaves much to your own imagination, you can make of it what you want. People either like the work or hate it. It's good, bad, and ugly all at the same time." --Joep van Lieshout More Information
 Untitled, 1996-1997 neon, glass tubing 240 x 480 in. Anonymous gift from three local residents with appreciation for the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden and contemporary art, 1996 Mario Merz is a leading artist of Arte Povera, a movement that emerged in Italy in the late 1960s among a group of artists dedicated to using the materials of everyday life and the natural world in their work. Igloos (made of such materials as glass, slate, or wax), spirals, the nature-related mathematical formula known as the Fibonacci sequence, and the elemental gas neon are recurring elements in Merz's art, often appearing in combination with one another. Political or literary references in neon script span the domes of his glass igloos, while the Fibonacci numbers (again in neon) spiral up the stairways of museums, as they did here at the Walker Art Center during his first American show in 1972. In the untitled piece the artist created for the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden, the words città irreale ("unreal city," a phrase from T. S. Eliot's poem The Waste Land) appear in spiralling red neon script on the side of the Cowles Conservatory, disappearing into the glass structure when the piece is unlit. More Information
 Standing Frame, 1987 charred white oak 172 x 209 3/4 x 209 1/2 in. Gift of Star Tribune and Cowles Media Foundation, 1987 British artist David Nash has been making sculptures from trees since the late 1970s. An ardent environmentalist, he uses only trees that have fallen or cuts fully mature specimens to open space for new growth. He then uses the wood as completely as possible, including the twigs and scraps, which are reduced to charcoal for his drawings. This work for the Garden was made from two white oaks found near Taylors Falls, Minnesota. Nash fashioned the stripped branches and trunk into an open square frame supported on three "legs," its sections joined in tongue-and-groove fashion and secured with wooden pegs. The resulting structure allows visitors to frame idealized views of the surrounding land and cityscape, reminding us of the role art can play in unifying man and nature. In 1994, after the wood's natural aging had turned the sculpture a pale gray, Nash charred its surface with a propane torch to embolden its sculptural line and provide a new seal. More Information
 Spoonbridge and Cherry, 1985-1988 aluminum, stainless steel, paint 354 x 618 x 162 in. Gift of Frederick R. Weisman in honor of his parents, William and Mary Weisman, 1988 Claes Oldenburg is best known for his ingenious, oversized renditions of ordinary objects, like the giant "soft" three-way plug and overturned bag of french fries in the Walker's own collection. He and Coosje van Bruggen, his wife and collaborator, had already created a number of large-scale public sculptures, including the Batcolumn in Chicago, when they were asked to design a fountain-sculpture for the planned Minneapolis Sculpture Garden. The spoon had appeared as a motif in a number of Oldenburg's drawings and plans over the years, inspired by a novelty item (a spoon resting on a glob of fake chocolate) he had acquired in 1962. Eventually the utensil emerged--in humorously gigantic scale--as the theme of the Minneapolis project. Van Bruggen contributed the cherry as a playful reference to the Garden's formal geometry, which reminded her of Versailles and the exaggerated dining etiquette Louis XIV imposed there. She also conceived the pond's shape in the form of linden seed. (Linden trees are planted along the allées that stretch before the fountain.) The complex fabrication of the 5,800 pound spoon and 1,200 pound cherry was carried out at two shipbuilding yards in New England. The sculpture has become a beloved icon in the Garden, whether glaceed with snow in the Minnesota winters or gleaming in the warmer months, with water flowing over the surface of the cherry and a fine mist rising from its stem. More Information
 Ampersand, 1987-1988 granite east column: 163 x 36 x 36 in. west column: 167 x 36 x 38 in. Gift of Margaret and Angus Wurtele, 1988 The stately pair of 14-foot stone columns that flank the main entrance to the Garden at its southern end were fashioned from a huge block of granite Martin Puryear found at the Cold Spring quarries, 75 miles northwest of Minneapolis. Puryear drove spikes into the massive stone to split it in two, and then used a machine lathe--like a pencil sharpener-- to hone each piece into its final form. One end of each column retains the block shape and rough natural surfaces of the original stone, while the other end has been shaped into a smooth, elegantly tapered conical form. Similar contrasts of form and surface appear throughout Puryear's work, in which such opposites as nature and culture, the organic and the machine-made, and primitive and modern coexist in harmony. By installing the columns in opposite directions--one on its pointed end, the other on its square base--Puryear also comments on the contrast between stability and instability and offers an intentional challenge to the formal symmetry of the southern half of the Garden. More Information
 Walking Man, 1988 bronze 72 x 36 x 30 in. Gift of the AT&T Foundation and the Julius E. Davis family in memory of Julius E. Davis, 1988 The pensive "everyman" George Segal created for the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden was made, like all his sculpture since the 1950s, from a plaster cast formed directly on a real-life model. Segal recast the work in bronze, applied the patina by hand to impart a rich, painterly quality, and placed the figure not on a pedestal, but on a simple fragment of concrete sidewalk near one of the Garden's tree-lined walkways. Here, passing visitors are drawn to this lonely, human-scaled figure. Segal acknowledges that his walking man is linked to a long tradition of striding figures in the history of art, beginning with the Egyptian prototype and "on and on through Rodin and Giacometti." Visitors to the Walker Art Center are well acquainted with one of Segal's famed "situation" sculptures, The Diner, in which two of his unpainted plaster figures inhabit the spare confines of a real-life coffee shop. It reminds us of the deep isolation that can accompany our encounters in everyday life. More Information
 Without Words, 1988 bronze, marble, limestone 78 x 80 x 118 in. overall Gift of Jeanne and Richard Levitt, 1988 Throughout her work, Judith Shea has used clothing to explore the nature and history of sculpture. Trained as a fashion designer, she soon found that field too restrictive and abandoned it in favor of sculpture, using clothes at first as abstract forms and, later, as surrogates for the human presence itself. By the mid-1980s, she began to place her figures into groups, suggesting psychological relationships among them and the possibility of a story. The three symbolic presences of Without Words are a rumpled raincoat, a spare and elegant dress, and the fragment of a classically molded head. This haunting trio seems to be carrying on a dialogue about modern life and antiquity. The head was based on an Egyptian Eighteenth Dynasty sculpture of Queen Tiye; the dress is reminiscent both of archaic Greek statuary and the sleek couture of the 1950s; the coat is modern, yet recalls the flowing drapery of classical sculpture. More Information
 Across; Fly, May 1997 In an afternoon filled with gravity-defying feats of courage and skill, the New York-based Elizabeth Streb/Ringside presented in the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden four works: Bounce (also performed the day before at the Metrodome prior to a Minnesota Twins game) and Surface, along with two Walker co-commissioned works, Across and Fly. Streb’s trademark risky, high-impact, airborne choreography combines the visceral impact of athletics with the poetry and split-second timing of dance. At the time it was performed in the Garden, Fly and Across were still at the work-in-progress stage but are a perfect example of the company’s art-meets-sport convergence point. Across was a duet performed on continually rolling rectangular platforms with wheels. The near misses and imminent crashes of the daring dancers pushed the boundaries of force, velocity, action, and reaction. Fly redefined the realities of above and below as five performers--two of whom were attached to air-float devices that rendered the body virtually weightless--enabled the dancers to pass, mingle, and create the perception that both planes of space are equally accessible. More Information
Grow or Die, 2002
mixed media Purchased with funds donated by Department 56, Inc., in honor of its founder, Edward R. Bazinet and the Frederick R. Weisman Collection of Art, 2002 New York-based artist Sarah Sze creates site-specific installations from colorful domestic materials such as clothespins, plastic flowers, packing crates, aluminum stepladders, gum, and breakfast cereal. While artist-in-residence at the Walker in May 2002, she created an installation set beneath the floor in the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden's Cowles Conservatory. Three viewing windows offer a glimpse of a vast and magical subterranean landscape populated by fake plants, found objects, and laboratory beakers spiraling downward. Animated by artificial lighting and fans, the underground tableaux allow viewers, in Sze's words, to "discover a site similar to the way an archaeologist uncovers layers of objects, monuments, and foundations." |
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Kinji Akagawa Garden Seating, Reading, Thinking, 1987 Siah Armajani Irene Hixon Whitney Bridge, 1988 Deborah Butterfield Woodrow, 1988 Ann Carlson Dead, September 1989 Tony Cragg Ordovician Pore, 1989 Chuck Davis Babu's Magic, July 1994 Jackie Ferrara Belvedere, 1988 Frank Gehry Standing Glass Fish, 1986 Dan Graham Two-way Mirror Punched Steel Hedge Labyrinth, 1994-1996 Brower Hatcher Prophecy of the Ancients, 1988 Jene Highstein Untitled, 1987-1988 Ellsworth Kelly Double Curve, 1988 Philip Larson The Six Crystals, 1988 Liz Lerman Dance Exchange Hallelujah/Minneapolis: In Praise of Beauty and Disorder, June 2001 Sol LeWitt X with Columns, 1996 Atelier van Lieshout The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, 1998 Mario Merz Untitled, 1996-1997 David Nash Standing Frame, 1987 Claes Oldenburg & Coosje van Bruggen Spoonbridge and Cherry, 1985-1988 Martin Puryear Ampersand, 1987-1988 George Segal Walking Man, 1988 Judith Shea Without Words, 1988 Elizabeth Streb/Ringside Across; Fly, May 1997 Sarah Sze Grow or Die, 2002 |