This article needs additional citations for verification .(June 2018) |
Bearing Witness | |
---|---|
Artist | Martin Puryear |
Year | 1997 |
Type | Sculpture |
Location | Washington, D.C., United States |
38°53′37″N77°01′48″W / 38.893635°N 77.029887°W |
Bearing Witness is an outdoor 1997 sculpture by Martin Puryear, installed outside the Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center in Washington, D.C., in the United States. [1] Twenty plus years after its construction the sculpture follows the characteristic style of Puryear and remains standing with minimal maintenance twenty plus years after its construction. The meaning of the sculpture is left up to interpretation, although many observers read into the inspirations Puryear may have had when designing the work.
Constructed in 1997 for the Reagan Building following the GSA’s standard of spending 1% of a buildings construction budget commissioning an artwork, the sculpture stands forty feet tall and weighs an estimated 20,000 pounds. [2] It cost one million dollars when commissioned, and remains the most expensive GSA commissioned artwork in D.C. [3] It is constructed out of separate bronze sheets formed into a large vertical structure with one flat side and the other with a large bulb curve. [4] The bronze sheets are held together by rivets into an interior, stainless steel armature. [5] This structure is the result of a partnership between Puryear and a Rhode island based shipbuilding company which he worked with to construct the sculpture. [6] At over twenty years old, the sculpture has required some light maintenance in order to conserve it. In a maintenance process conducted by the McKay Lodge Conservation team, a resin coating is applied to the several feet at the bottom of the sculpture, and a wax coating over the entire surface. [5]
Martin Puryear is a D.C. born artist known for his various abstract sculptures. Although his general expertise lies in woodworking, the all metal form of the sculpture “Bearing Witness” is one of a few that diverge from this background, such as his all brick sculpture “by Way of Africa”. [7] [8] Despite the change in medium, the sculpture still bears the abstract and minimalistic style that characterizes Puryear’s work, intentionally designing his sculptures to avoid forcing a rigid narrative on the audience. [9] While leaving it open to interpretation, Puryear has confirmed some of the intent behind his sculpture, purposely selecting the location and orienting the sculpture outward from the Reagan Center. Mindful of the political and government setting the sculpture would be placed into, Puryear has commented the orientation facing away from the building represents how within a democracy “people talk back to the government”. [7]
Despite its size and prominent location “Bearing Witness” has been the focus of minimal criticism, aside from general criticism over the extensive costs of GSA funded artwork. [2] It is colloquially referred to as “the thumb” by locals, and is the site of occasional concerts, art “jams”, and food tabling. [10] Many observers connect the form of the sculpture to that of a head, or possibly a fang mask, which inspired many of Puryear’s other artworks. [6] Art critic David Levi-Strauss makes the claim that the sculpture is inspired by the head of Puryear’s daughter, Sasha. [11]
The Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center, named after former United States President Ronald Reagan, is located in downtown Washington, D.C., and was the first federal building in Washington designed for both governmental and private sector purposes.
Martin L. Puryear is an Afro-American artist known for his devotion to traditional craft. Working in a variety of media, but primarily wood, his reductive technique and meditative approach challenge the physical and poetic boundaries of his materials. The artist's Liberty/Libertà exhibition represented the United States at the 2019 Venice Biennale.
The J. Edgar Hoover Building is a low-rise office building located at 935 Pennsylvania Avenue NW in Washington, D.C., in the United States. It is the headquarters of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).
Events from the year 1997 in art.
The William Jefferson Clinton Federal Building is a complex of several historic buildings located in the Federal Triangle in Washington, D.C., across 12th Street, NW from the Old Post Office. The complex now houses the headquarters of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).
The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth is an art museum of post-World War II art in Fort Worth, Texas with a collection of international modern and contemporary art. Founded in 1892, The Modern is located in the city's cultural district in a building designed by architect Tadao Ando which opened to the public in 2002. The museum is accredited by the American Alliance of Museums and holds a permanent collection with more than 3,000 works of art.
The AT&T Michigan Headquarters is a complex of skyscrapers and buildings located at 1st Street, Cass Avenue, State Street, and Michigan Avenue in Downtown Detroit, Michigan. It contains the AT&T Building, the AT&T Building addition, the Maintenance Shop and is owned by communications giant AT&T.
The Robert F. Kennedy Department of Justice Building, sometimes called Main Justice, is the headquarters of the United States Department of Justice. It houses Department of Justice offices, including the office of the United States Attorney General. The building was completed in 1935. In 2001, it was renamed after Robert F. Kennedy, the 64th Attorney General of the United States.
The Herbert C. Hoover Building is the Washington, D.C. headquarters of the United States Department of Commerce.
John Ochsendorf is an American educator, structural engineer, and historian of construction; he is a professor in the Department of Architecture and the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is widely known for becoming a MacArthur Fellow in 2008 He served as the Director of the American Academy in Rome from 2017 to 2020. In 2022, he was appointed the founding director of the newly created MIT Morningside Academy for Design.
John Fitzgerald Kennedy Federal Building is a United States federal government office building located in the Government Center area of Boston, Massachusetts, adjacent to City Hall Plaza and diagonally across from Boston City Hall. An example of 1960s modern architecture, and designed by Walter Gropius and The Architects Collaborative with Samuel Glaser, it is a complex that consists of two offset 26-floor towers that sit on-axis to each other and a low rise building of four floors that connects to the two towers through an enclosed glass corridor. The two towers stand at a height of 387 feet (118 m). The complex was built in 1963-1966. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2021.
The Federal Office Building, Seattle, Washington is a historic federal office building located at Seattle in King County, Washington.
The William J. Nealon Federal Building and United States Courthouse is a courthouse of the United States District Court for the Middle District of Pennsylvania, located in Scranton, Pennsylvania. It was completed in 1931, and was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2018.
Alyson Shotz is an American sculptor based in Brooklyn, New York. She is known for experiential, large-scale abstract sculptures and installations inspired by nature and scientific concepts, which manipulate light, shadow, space and gravity in order to investigate and complicate perception. Writers suggest her work challenges tenets of monumental, minimalist sculpture—traditionally welded, solid, heavy and static—through its accumulation of common materials in constructions that are often flexible, translucent, reflective, seemingly weightless, and responsive to changing conditions and basic forces. Sculpture critic Lilly Wei wrote, "In Shotz’s realizations, the definition of sculpture becomes increasingly expansive—each project, often in series, testing another proposition, another possibility, another permutation, while ignoring conventional boundaries."
Continuum is a public artwork by American sculptor Charles O. Perry located in front of the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, DC, United States.
Modern sculpture is generally considered to have begun with the work of Auguste Rodin, who is seen as the progenitor of modern sculpture. While Rodin did not set out to rebel against the past, he created a new way of building his works. He "dissolved the hard outline of contemporary Neo-Greek academicism, and thereby created a vital synthesis of opacity and transparency, volume and void". Along with a few other artists in the late 19th century who experimented with new artistic visions in sculpture like Edgar Degas and Paul Gauguin, Rodin invented a radical new approach in the creation of sculpture. Modern sculpture, along with all modern art, "arose as part of Western society's attempt to come to terms with the urban, industrial and secular society that emerged during the nineteenth century".
She Who Must Be Obeyed is a minimalist sculpture 33 feet (10 m) wide and 16 feet (4.9 m) deep made by Tony Smith in 1975. It is located at the Frances Perkins Building, in downtown Washington, D.C. The piece consists of nine geometric rhomboid units, bolted and welded together and painted blue.
The conservation and restoration of outdoor artworks is the activity dedicated to the preservation and protection of artworks that are exhibited or permanently installed outside. These works may be made of wood, stone, ceramic material, plastic, bronze, copper, or any other number of materials and may or may not be painted. When applied to cultural heritage this activity is generally undertaken by a conservator-restorer.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture Cotton Annex is an office building located at 300 12th Street SW in Washington, D.C. The size of the building has been variously given at 89,000 square feet and 118,000 square feet.
Negro Mother and Child is a 1934 sculpture by American artist Maurice Glickman (1906–1981). The New Deal artwork was produced under the early Public Works of Art Project and later installed in a courtyard at the Main Interior Building in Washington, D.C.