Sculpture in the Streets
Two Conical Segments Gyratory IIThe Art of a Kinetic Sculptor
The Downtown Albany Business Improvement District (BID) welcomes the late American kinetic sculptor George Rickey (1907 – 2002) as the featured artist for the 2011 Sculpture in the Streets, an outdoor art exhibition walking tour in downtown Albany. Referred to as a pioneer in kinetic sculpture, Rickey pieces come to life with the slightest breeze, making him a unique figure in contemporary art. Sculptures as large as 14 feet high and 22 feet wide are slated for the exhibition.
Walking tour begins June 17, 2011 and runs through March 2012
The exhibit and tour are free and open to the public. Walking tour maps will be available at area merchants, the Downtown Albany BID office at 40 North Pearl Street, Albany and online.
The Bender Family Foundation and the downtown Albany BID are excited to be hosting artwork of this caliber in downtown Albany. Large scale, outdoor sculpture on loan from the Rickey Foundation is a very rare occurrence. In fact, the exhibit will be only the third of its kind in the United States in terms of collection, size and scope.
The five visiting pieces from the Rickey Foundation are:
• Two Conical Segments Gyratory II;
• Rectangles Horizontal Jointed Big, Thin, Small;
• Three Squares Gyratory I;
• Six Lines In A “T”; and
• Column of Four Squares Excentric Gyratory III.
Get a sneak peek of the sculptures.
The Capital Region is home to three publically displayed Rickey pieces incorporated into the exhibition:
• The Albany Institute of History and Art (Etoile Variation V);
• Empire State Plaza (Two Lines Oblique); and
• The Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) Greene Building (Six Random Lines Excentric).
Additional Rickey pieces can be found in the collections on the Rensselaer Polytechnic campus in Troy, as well as numerous private collections locally and worldwide. The current art installation at the Albany International Airport also features a ceiling sculpture by Rickey titled “Four Triangles Hanging” located behind security check point.
About George Rickey (1907-2002)
Biography information provided by the Rickey Foundation
Geroge Rickey
George Rickey was born on June 6, l907, in South Bend, Indiana, where his father, trained as an engineer at MIT, had been sent as assistant plant manager to the Singer Company. His mother was the daughter of a judge in Schenectady, and an early graduate of Smith College, his grandfather the clockmaker in Athol, Massachusetts, where George spent several winter months that remained vivid in his memory. It was where he first took apart a clock and was frustrated that he could not reassemble it. The third of six children, and only boy, he and his family moved to Scotland in l9l3, when his father was made managing director of the Singer Company in Glasgow. The family lived in Helensburgh, a stone throw from the river Clyde, where George watched the ebb and flow from his window. He spent his formative years at Glenalmond, a boarding school near Perth.
He always attributed his love for learning to his years there, and on graduation was accepted at Oxford where he studied Modern History at Balliol College, with frequent visits to the Ruskin School of Drawing. Following his heart, and against the advice of his father, upon graduating he spent the following year in Paris, studying at Académie L’Hote and Académie Moderne, while earning his keep as an English instructor at the Gardiner School. In Paris he met Endicott Peabody, Rector at Groton School, Massachusetts, who offered him a job as history teacher at Groton, where he remained for three years after his return to the States in 1930.
He maintained an art studio in New York from l934 to l942, when he was drafted. In l947 he married Edith (Edie) Leighton (died l995); they had two sons: Stuart, b. l953, and Philip, b. l959. Rickey’s interest in things mechanical re-awakened during his wartime work in aircraft and gunnery systems research and maintenance. After the war, although trained as a painter, he turned from painting to sculpture in l949. His first sculpture was shown in New York in 1951 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s group show “American Sculpture 1951”, and in Europe in l957, and he is extensively represented in public and private collections. His sculptures can be seen in major museums in the US and around the world, among them at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, who in 1965 purchased his seminal Two Lines Temporal I, after Alfred Barr, Moma’s then Director, had seen it at the exhibition Documenta III in Kassel, Germany, the year before.
Rickey has exhibited his work in major cities in the US and in most European capitals, as well as in Asia and the Antipodies; in institutions as close by as the Albany Institute of History and Art, who owns a large hanging sculpture, The Etoile, and as far away as Auckland City Art Gallery, New Zealand. During this time he received numerous Honorary Doctor of Fine Arts degrees, and wrote a book “Constructivism – origins and evolution”, published in 1967 by George Braziller, Inc., New York.
In 1961, after leaving New Orleans, where he had taught for several years at Tulane University, he and his family moved to an old farmhouse in East Chatham, New York, which remained his main residence and studio. From 1961 to 1966 he taught 3 dimensional fundamentals to first year architecture students at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy. In l966 he gave up teaching to fully devote his time to the making of sculpture. George’s choice of living in Columbia County came through a colleague at Tulane who, one summer, lent George a house she owned there. The family had decided that they were not going to spend another summer in the hot and humid New Orleans and looked around for a house to buy. They found an old farmhouse, with a Shaker staircase, and never regretted their choice to live and work in the country.
However, they had not given up city life. They owned an apartment in New York City, and every winter they went to Berlin, Germany, where George in 1968 had received a stipend from Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (a German Academic Exchange Service), which was renewed in 1969. That year George established a small studio and living space in Berlin, to which city they returned throughout the winter months for the next two decades. The time was spent constructing sculpture and preparing for exhibitions in Europe. In Rickey’s words the city was like a ”cocoon” in the middle of communist Germany, with a lively and advanced social and cultural life which they partook in fully. Since spring comes early in Germany, and as they returned to the US in mid May, they felt that each year they experienced two springs.
Later on, when he had given up Berlin, he and Edie established a small studio and home in Santa Barbara, California, “their nest in the west”, in Edie’s words, where they wintered and worked. In the last year of Rickey’s life, he moved to St. Paul, Minnesota, where he maintained a small studio and returned to the easel. This move made it possible for him to be near his son Philip and wife Mary and their two small children. He died in St. Paul on July 17, 2002.
