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The Eleanor Blake Kirkpatrick Memorial Tower was commissioned in 1999 to be the signature sculpture of the Oklahoma City Museum of Art in the Donald W. Reynolds Visual Arts Center. The Tower stands as a memorial to the late Eleanor Blake Kirkpatrick, a Museum founder. It is one of the largest Chihuly towers in the world, occupying the three-story atrium in the Museum’s main lobby. The Tower is 55 ft. tall, 7′ 6″ in diameter, and is mounted on a black granite reflecting pool. It is comprised of 2,100 individually blown glass parts, held together by a seven piece steel armature, or spine, with 2,100 individual forks, and weighs 20,000 pounds. Illuminated 24 hours a day, The Tower rises as a beacon for Museum visitors. It is one of the many tower-type sculptures Chihuly has made since 1996, of which no two are alike. Dale Chihuly's practice of putting together teams of artists with exceptional glassblowing skills has led to the development of complex, multipart sculptures of dramatic beauty and scale that place him in the leadership role of moving blown glass out of the confines of the small, precious object and into the realm of large-scale sculpture and environmental art. In fact, Chihuly deserves much of the credit for establishing the blown glass form as an accepted medium for installation art and, hence, for contemporary expression in late twentieth and twenty-first century art generally.
Rudyard Kipling quotes (English short-story writer, poet, and novelist. Nobel Prize(1907), 1865-1936 |
