John David Mooney is a Chicago-based, internationally recognized artist, known for his large-scale public sculptures, light pieces, and environmental installations. Astronomy, science, and nature have played a significant role in Mooney's art, and his public sculptures often draw inspiration from the spirit of place, the importance of the site, its history, and present environment. [1]
A Champaign native, Mooney received his MFA from University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. In 1994, Mooney was an artist-in-residence at the Vatican Observatory at Castel Gandolfo and created outdoor sculptures inspired by astronomical phenomena at the Observatory's rooftop telescopes and Vatican gardens. [2] His 48-story light sculpture became the icon for the 1996 Atlanta Olympic Games, [3] and his Malta Millennium sculpture, commissioned by the government of Malta, ushered in 2000. [4] Other important projects include Light Muse, the transformation of the Tribune Tower into a light sculpture to celebrate the Chicago Tribune's sesquicentennial in 1997, and Lightscape '89, a display projected on the IBM Building in Chicago in honor of the company's 75th anniversary. [5] [6]
In North America, Mooney's commissions include Crystara, a 30-foot-long Waterford Crystal and aluminum suspended sculpture created for the John Crerar Library at the University of Chicago; [7] the Miami Wave, a 57,000 sq. ft. paving piece designed for a new entrance to the Miami International Airport; [8] Wild Ricing Moon, a 95-foot-high sculpture honoring the Native Americans for the University of Minnesota Duluth; and Spiral Galaxy , a 16' high stainless steel sculpture located on the grounds in front of the Adler Planetarium in Chicago. [9]
The artist's Art in the Park project for Urbana, Illinois, was completed in the spring of 2012 with the installation of Spirit Tree, a 33-foot-high light sculpture. Mooney designed all of the park's components: Falling Leaf, the park's 12-foot-high mirrored polished stainless steel fountain sculpture; the landscaping and plant material; the paving; the furniture; and the lighting.
The artist's work is in numerous private and public collections, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, The Art Institute of Chicago, and major museums in Europe.
Mooney has had a distinguished academic career, having taught at numerous institutions throughout the United States and Europe. He was named a Distinguished Professor and Critic at the University of North Carolina's College of Architecture and a Distinguished Professor and Scholar in the Fine Arts at the University of Southern Indiana. In Europe, he has taught at such institutions as the National College of Art and Design in Dublin, the Glasgow School of Art in Glasgow, and the Royal College of Art's Graduate School of Art in London. In 2016 he signed the pptArt Manifesto, [10] [11] an international art movement that today promotes many notable initiatives like the Corporate Art Awards.
He is founder and artistic director of the John David Mooney Foundation, which since 1981, has offered international artists and architects a place to study their postgraduate, advance disciplines and transform the public domain through art.
Mooney has received honorary doctorates from Purdue University, Dominican University, and Lyon College. [12] He has been the recipient of more than eight fellowships including the National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts Fellowship, the Royal Society of the Arts Fellowship, and four fellowships from the MacDowell Colony. Among his many honors, Mooney received the Eloise G. ReQua International Humanitarian Award in 1999 awarded by the Chicago-Kent School of Law at the Illinois Institute of Technology. In 2006, Mooney awarded the Chicago Illini of the Year from his alma mater.
Castel Gandolfo, colloquially just Castello in the Castelli Romani dialects, is a town located 25 kilometres (16 mi) southeast of Rome in the Lazio region of Italy. Occupying a height on the Alban Hills overlooking Lake Albano, Castel Gandolfo has a population of approximately 8,900 residents and is considered one of Italy's most scenic towns.
The Vatican Observatory is an astronomical research and educational institution supported by the Holy See. Originally based in the Roman College of Rome, the Observatory is now headquartered in Castel Gandolfo, Italy and operates a telescope at the Mount Graham International Observatory in the United States.
Martin L. Puryear is an American artist known for his devotion to traditional craft. Working in wood and bronze, among other media, his reductive technique and meditative approach challenge the physical and poetic boundaries of his materials. The artist's Martin Puryear: Liberty/Libertà exhibition represented the United States at the 2019 Venice Biennale.
The papal apartments is the non-official designation for the collection of apartments, which are private, state, and religious, that wrap around a courtyard on two sides of the third (top) floor of the Apostolic Palace in Vatican City.
The Pontifical Commission for Vatican City State is the legislative body of Vatican City. It consists of a president, who also holds the title of President of the Governorate of Vatican City State, and six other cardinals appointed by the pope for five-year terms.
Richard Howard Hunt is an American sculptor. In the second half of the 20th century, he became "the foremost African-American abstract sculptor and artist of public sculpture." Hunt, the descendant of enslaved people brought through the port of Savannah from West Africa, studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in the 1950s, and while there received multiple prizes for his work. He was the first African American sculptor to have a retrospective at Museum of Modern Art in 1971. Hunt has created over 160 public sculpture commissions in prominent locations in 24 states across the United States, more than any other sculptor.
Cloud Gate is a public sculpture by Indian-born British artist Anish Kapoor, that is the centerpiece of AT&T Plaza at Millennium Park in the Loop community area of Chicago, Illinois. The sculpture and AT&T Plaza are located on top of Park Grill, between the Chase Promenade and McCormick Tribune Plaza & Ice Rink. Constructed between 2004 and 2006, the sculpture is nicknamed "The Bean" because of its shape, a name Kapoor initially disliked, but later grew fond of. Made up of 168 stainless steel plates welded together, its highly polished exterior has no visible seams. It measures 33 by 66 by 42 feet, and weighs 110 short tons.
Janet Echelman is an American sculptor and fiber artist. Her sculptures have been displayed as public art, often as site-specific installations.
Tony Tasset is an American multimedia artist. His works consists mainly of video, bronze, wax, sculpture, photography, film, and taxidermy. He has exhibitions that can be seen in Dallas, Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, Germany, Canada, Portugal, Italy, Ecuador, and London.
Eve is an outdoor sculpture of the biblical Eve created by Robert William Davidson in 1931. It is currently located in a fountain at Ball Nurses' Sunken Garden and Convalescent Park on the campus of Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI). The overall dimensions of this bronze sculpture are 5’ tall, 2’ long, and 1’ wide.
Victoria Barrett Fuller is an American artist, sculptor, natural science illustrator, and award-winning singer, songwriter, and musician.
Tom Joyce is a sculptor and MacArthur Fellow known for his work in forged steel and cast iron. Using skills and technology acquired through early training as a blacksmith, Joyce addresses the environmental, political, and social implications of using iron in his work. Exhibited internationally since the 1980s, his work is included in 30-plus public collections in the U.S. and abroad. Joyce works from studios in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and since 2012, in Brussels, Belgium, producing sculpture, drawings, prints, photographs, and videos that reference themes of iron in the human body, iron in industry, and iron in nature.
Nancy Davidson is an American artist best known for large-scale inflatable sculptures regarded as hyper-feminized abstractions of the human female form. Bulbous and flesh-like, the sculptures resemble buttocks and breasts and employ erotic cultural signifiers in their shape and decoration. Davidson's work spans art media but centers around sculpture. It is largely post-minimal in character and described by commentators as providing a feminist counterpoint to the male-dominated, minimalist sculpture of the 1960s, as well as to cultural tropes involving bodies that the works themselves invoke. Of particular note are Davidson's use of humor and a sense of absurdity to seemingly both celebrate and subvert these tropes, inviting their investigation but without the seriousness and moralism that often accompany critical works. Sculpture Magazine critic Robert Raczka wrote that "The confectionary color and oversize scale" of Davidson's sculpture creates a "playfully upbeat mood that allows feminist and gender issues to rise to the surface at irregular intervals, without didacticism." The New Art Examiner's Susan Canning described it as establishing "a context where all can revel in the transgressive and liberating power of the grotesque."
The Papal Palace of Castel Gandolfo, or the Apostolic Palace of Castel Gandolfo from its Italian name Palazzo Apostolico di Castel Gandolfo, is a 135-acre (54.6-ha) complex of buildings in a garden setting in the city of Castel Gandolfo, Italy, including the principal 17th-century villa, an observatory and a farmhouse with 75 acres (30.4 ha) of farmland. The main structure, the Papal Palace, has been a museum since October 2016. It served for centuries as a summer residence and vacation retreat for the pope, the leader of the Catholic Church, and is afforded extraterritorial status as one of the properties of the Holy See. It overlooks Lake Albano.
Rockne Krebs was a contemporary American artist and sculptor.
Sabina Ott was an American artist known for her broad range of work—from painting to installation to sculpture—and her central role in the art world as teacher, administrator, and recently, as the founder of the exhibition space Terrain, which invites artists to create installations and performances using the exterior of her Oak Park home.
Simone Leigh is an American artist from Chicago who works in New York City in the United States. She works in various media including sculpture, installations, video, performance, and social practice. Leigh has described her work as auto-ethnographic, and her interests include African art and vernacular objects, performance, and feminism. Her work is concerned with the marginalization of women of color and reframes their experience as central to society. Leigh has often said that her work is focused on “Black female subjectivity,” with an interest in complex interplays between various strands of history. She was named one of the 100 most influential people in the world by Time magazine in 2023.
Looking Into My Dreams, Awilda, or simply Awilda, is a 2012 sculpture by Jaume Plensa.
Spiral Galaxy is an outdoor stainless steel sculpture by John David Mooney, installed outside the Adler Planetarium on Chicago's Northerly Island, in the U.S. state of Illinois.
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