Seattle Art Museum: Exhibition Information

The following is a description of all the sculptures and works of art at the Olympic Sculpture Park. To see where the works are located, print out the art map (PDF). You can also take a virtual tour of the art. This tour uses the Flash 8 player. Download player.

Ellsworth Kelly arrives at his work through a prolonged experience of observing nature, and distilling his observations and sensations into simple lines, planes and forms. Although its silhouette at first appears entirely abstract, Curve XXIV suggests a rust-hued autumn ginkgo leaf. The narrowest of relief sculptures, it projects an expansive space; its surface coloration and texture echo painting—a reflection of the artist’s long-standing concern with the overlap of these art form.

For thirty years, Seattle-based photographer Glenn Rudolph has documented the Pacific Northwest using the camera as a time machine to record evidence of historical and environmental transformation. He considers his work nonfiction photography that explores how people react to changing situations. Rudolph first photographed the Olympic Sculpture Park site in 1986, and was commissioned to record its evolution during the construction of the park in 2005–2006. This series of fifteen photographs consists of new images, as well as images selected from the body of work he shot twenty years ago. The pictures portray the human effects of development in downtown Seattle, and document individuals who live unnoticed in the park at the edges of public activity. Glenn Rudolph, a graduate of the University of Washington’s School of Art, has spent the last thirty years observing the changing face of the Pacific Northwest. Glenn Rudolph lives and works in the Seattle area.

This exhibition was organized by the Seattle Art Museum and made possible with generous support from PONCHO and the Seattle Art Museum Supporters (SAMS). Additional support provided by contributors to the Annual Fund.

Pedro Reyes’ interactive, sculptural Capulas are part of an ongoing series that he has installed around the world. Woven by Mexican craftspeople, these vinyl sculptures translate local basketry techniques into an architectural scale. Seen against Reyes’ mural, their solid geometry becomes flattened and optical. In the mural, as in the space of the Pavilion itself, human beings interact with geometry and respond to changing visual systems. The mural incorporates graphic design, technical drawing and perspectival diagrams to imagine a world of varied spaces, both two-dimensional and three-dimensional. Pedro Reyes was born in Mexico City in 1972 where he currently lives and works.

This installation was organized by the Seattle Art Museum and made possible with generous support from the Seattle Art Museum Supporters (SAMS) and the Anne Gerber Endowment. Additional support provided by contributors to the Annual Fund.

One of the greatest British sculptors of the twentieth century, Anthony Caro was among the first artists to explore the language of abstraction in large-scale sculpture. Riviera is choreographed with an extended series of irregular forms, and unfolds laterally, like a landscape. The rhythmic vertical and horizontal structure retains a strongly architectural character, and because it is constructed of parts, Riviera appeals to the eye as an object meant to be read in time, rather than absorbed in a single look.

For Richard Serra, space is a substance as tangible as sculpture. He uses materials and scale to alter perception and to engage the body, encouraging consciousness of our relation to space. The towering, curved-steel forms of Wake were achieved with computer imaging and machines that manufacture ship hulls, including a demilitarized machine that once made French nuclear submarines. Wake is composed of five identical modules, each with two S-shaped sections positioned in inverted relation to one another—gently curving serpentines of convex and concave parts that suggest tidal waves or profiles of battleships. The surface of acid-washed, weatherproof steel reinforces this industrial effect. Wake’s powerful silhouette belies a complex configuration of parts; the whole cannot be known at once, but can only be experienced with movement and in time.

For ancient civilizations, a well-positioned stone created a connection to the cosmos and left vital evidence of a human presence. A similar sense of timelessness and gravity is evoked by Beverly Pepper’s monolithic Persephone Unbound. Persephone, Queen of the Underworld, was abducted by Hades; when a rescue effort failed, Hades fed her a pomegranate, and she was bound to the underworld for one-third of each year. Persephone Unbound suggests the ideal of freedom, while at the same time embodies the unchanging eternity to which Persephone was subjected.

One of the first sculptors of her generation to be captivated by the possibilities of industrial materials and geometric forms, Pepper achieved a cool objectivity in Perre’s Ventaglio III, which reveals no trace of the artist’s hand or process, but possesses the sleek appearance of a manufactured object. Light heightens the optical effect of the sculpture, whose surface reflects the surrounding natural environment—a striking contrast with the opaque-blue enamel paint on the interior of each cubic form.

Welded steel was a material favored by sculptors of Louise Nevelson’s generation, but she became known for working in wood and only later incorporated Plexiglass, aluminum and Lucite into her repertoire. Sky Landscape I translates her approach to constructed sculpture from wood to metal. A collage of distinct parts, this work consists of two totemic elements that extend upward to the sky, accented by flourishes of curved metal. While standing in three dimensions, Sky Landscape I reflects Nevelson’s devotion to relief sculpture and to the creation of heightened drama within a narrow field of space.

Roxy Paine’s graceful towering stainless steel tree evolved from a detailed analysis of a tree’s structure, a composition reconstructed through drawings, computer diagrams and architectural renderings. Comprising steel pipes of more than twenty different diameters, its heavy industrial plates support approximately 5,000 pounds of cantilevered branches. Camouflaged in the natural setting and light, Split reflects its surroundings and poses the question, “What is nature; what is art?”

The Neukom Vivarium is a hybrid work of sculpture, architecture, environmental education and horticulture that connects art and science. Sited at the corner of Elliott Avenue and Broad Street, it features a sixty-foot-long nurse log in an eighty-foot-long custom-designed greenhouse. Set on a slab under the glass roof of the greenhouse, the log has been removed from the forest ecosystem and now inhabits an art system. Its ongoing decay and renewal represents nature as a complex system of cycles and processes. Visitors observe life-forms within the log using microscopes and magnifying glasses supplied in a cabinet designed by the artist. Illustrations of potential log inhabitants—bacteria, fungi, lichen, plants and insects—decorate blue and white tiles that function as a field guide, assisting visitors’ identification of specimens.

A third-generation American sculptor, Alexander Calder studied mechanical engineering before studying art. While in Paris in the 1920s and 30s, Calder developed two distinctive genres of sculpture: mobiles, or sculptures that move, and stabiles, which are still. Eagle, created at a time when Calder was recognized as one of the world’s greatest sculptors, reveals the artist’s distinctive combination of pragmatism and poetry. Architectural in its construction and scale, Eagle displays its curving wings, assertive stance and pointy beak in a form that is weightless, colorful and abstract.

The criss crossing steel beams of Mark di Suvero’s Bunyon’s Chess operate like broad brushstrokes drawn in space, a vocabulary that was radically new in sculpture at the time it was made. The artist’s first private commission, Bunyon’s Chess was created specifically for outdoor presentation in Seattle and makes wood a prominent element—a counterpoint to the structure of stainless steel. Di Suvero’s interest in sculpture’s kinetic qualities, inspired by Alexander Calder, and the artist’s use of found objects have remained constants in his career. His numerous public and private commissions, often monumental in scale, are sited worldwide.

Roy McMakin’s Bench is a natural extension of his iconic chair shapes—essential forms that balance proportion, construction, and image in equal measure—that the artist has refined over the past twenty years. His design solution is a two-sided, all-weather outdoor seat that could be extruded in a limitless number of lengths without losing its universally recognizable silhouette.

Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen fashion large-scale outdoor sculptures inspired by popular commercial objects. Inflated to a colossal scale and imbued with decidedly figurative characteristics, common items such as the typewriter eraser are made into unlikely public monuments. These images are recognized by many but are ambiguous as civic messages. The typewriter eraser was a quaint, democratically available office tool when the artist initially conceived the sculpture, but by the time this example was made, the computer had compromised the popularity of the typewriter, making such erasers nearly obsolete.

Mathematical and geometrical structures inherent in molecules and crystals inspired the tetrahedral and octahedral shapes of Wandering Rocks. Tony Smith, who began his career as an architect, was compelled by questions of structure and by a belief in the mythical and archetypal symbolism of forms. Wandering Rocks borrows its title from references to the wandering of Ulysses in James Joyce’s book. The organization of Wandering Rocks' five parts pays homage to the Ryoanji Zen garden in Kyoto, Japan.

An architect in his early years, Tony Smith first experimented with sculpture when he was nearly fifty. Stinger, one of his most monumental works, recalls an ancient structure such as a fortress with three closed sides and one open side, inviting the viewer to cross a threshold to its interior. Composed of cross sections of tetrahedral and octahedral shapes, the sculpture combines a simple plan and complex elevation; resting on a single point, it appears to levitate above the ground. Originally called “Bad Gate,” Smith titled Stinger after the popular cocktail that is sweet but unexpectedly intoxicating.

Teresita Fernández’s glass canopy Seattle Cloud Cover, incorporates images of the changing sky discovered in nature and art. Fernández’s first permanent publicly sited work invites viewers to take cover and to look down to the railroad below, and at the same time, experience the images of Seattle’s changing skies as seen through saturated color photographs sandwiched in glass. In the visual layering of nature and art, and in the relationship of the bridge to its setting, one recognizes how images of nature influence the way we see nature. Fully integrated into the park’s construction, the canopy provides safe access over the railroad tracks and on sunny days, brightens the park’s path with colored light.

The raw metal surface of Mark di Suvero’s Schubert Sonata possesses a heroic scale and a distinctively urban and industrial flavor, offset by the delicately balanced, virtuosic circular structure, which opens to the sky. This ribbon of metal, delineated by organic and geometric forms, stands poised on a single point and spins—a reflection of the artist’s long-standing interest in the possibilities for motion in sculpture. This work is part of a series dedicated to composers.

An artist, furniture maker and architect, Roy McMakin’s work blurs the boundaries between these disciplines and amplifies tensions between form, function and meaning. Full of visual and verbal puns, Love & Loss commissioned specifically for the Olympic Sculpture Park, includes benches that are functional and meaningful. As seating made of words, these benches speak. A tree forms the “v” of love, which will blossom seasonally and lose its leaves, a reminder of nature’s cycling that mirrors human experience.

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