Found object is a loan translation from the French objet trouvé, describing art created from undisguised, but often modified, objects or products that are not normally considered materials from which art is made, often because they already have a non-art function. Pablo Picasso first publicly utilized the idea when he pasted a printed image of chair caning onto his painting titled Still Life with Chair Caning (1912). Marcel Duchamp is thought to have perfected the concept several years later when he made a series of ready-mades, consisting of completely unaltered everyday objects selected by Duchamp and designated as art. The most famous example is Fountain (1917), a standard urinal purchased from a hardware store and displayed on a pedestal, resting on its side. In its strictest sense the term "ready-made" is applied exclusively to works produced by Marcel Duchamp, who borrowed the term from the clothing industry while living in New York, and especially to works dating from 1913 to 1921.
Site-specific art is artwork created to exist in a certain place. Typically, the artist takes the location into account while planning and creating the artwork. Site-specific art is produced both by commercial artists, and independently, and can include some instances of work such as sculpture, stencil graffiti, rock balancing, and other art forms. Installations can be in urban areas, remote natural settings, or underwater.
Alamo, also known as the Astor Place Cube or simply The Cube, is an outdoor sculpture by Bernard (Tony) Rosenthal, located on Astor Place, in the East Village neighborhood of Manhattan in New York City. It is a black cube, 8 feet (2.4 m) long on each side, mounted on a corner. The cube is made of Cor-Ten steel and weighs about 1,800 pounds (820 kg). The faces of the cube are not flat but have various indentations, protrusions, and ledges. The sculpture's name, Alamo, is designated on a small plaque on the base and was selected by the artist's wife because its scale and mass reminded her of the Alamo Mission. It was fabricated by Lippincott, Inc.
Jaume Plensa is a Spanish artist and sculptor.
Panayiotis Vassilakis, also known as Takis, was a self-taught Greek artist known for his kinetic sculptures. He exhibited his artworks in Europe and the United States. Popular in France, his works can be found in public locations in and around Paris, as well as at the Athens-based Takis Foundation Research Center for the Arts and Sciences.
Solomon "Sol" LeWitt was an American artist linked to various movements, including Conceptual art and Minimalism.
Mona Hatoum is a Palestinian multimedia and installation artist who lives in London.
Daniel Graham is an American artist, writer, and curator.
The McGovern Institute for Brain Research is a research institute within MIT. Its mission is to understand how the brain works and to discover new ways to prevent or treat brain disorders. The institute was founded in 2000 by Patrick McGovern and Lore Harp McGovern with a gift to MIT that is expected to total $350M over 20 years.
Charles Ray is a Los Angeles-based American sculptor. He is known for his strange and enigmatic sculptures that draw the viewer's perceptual judgments into question in jarring and unexpected ways. Christopher Knight in the Los Angeles Times wrote that Ray's "career as an artist…is easily among the most important of the last twenty years."
Katharina Fritsch is a German sculptor. She lives and works in Düsseldorf, Germany.
The Void Cube is a 3-D mechanical puzzle similar to a Rubik's Cube, with the notable difference being that the center pieces are missing, which causes the puzzle to resemble a level 1 Menger sponge. The core used on the Rubik's Cube is also absent, creating holes straight through the cube on all three axes. Due to the restricted volume of the puzzle it employs an entirely different structural mechanism from a regular Rubik's Cube, though the possible moves are the same. The Void Cube was invented by Katsuhiko Okamoto. Gentosha Education, in Japan, holds the license to manufacture Void Cubes.
Indiana state stone is a public sculpture at the Indiana Statehouse in downtown Indianapolis. It is an 85-pound (39 kg) cube of Indiana limestone that is mounted on a wooden, rotating dolly. It was carved from limestone quarried from the P. M. & B. limestone quarry located in southern Indiana. This sculpture commemorates limestone becoming Indiana's official state stone on March 1, 1971.
Renaissance is a public artwork by American artist David Bakalar, located at the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Washington, D.C., United States.
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.
New possibilities opened up by the concept of four-dimensional space helped inspire many modern artists in the first half of the twentieth century. Early Cubists, Surrealists, Futurists, and abstract artists took ideas from higher-dimensional mathematics and used them to radically advance their work.
Bellerophon Taming Pegasus is an outdoor sculpture by Jacques Lipchitz, depicting Bellerophon and Pegasus. It was the final sculpture worked on by Lipchitz, and was completed after his death in 1973.
Transitron Electronic Corporation was a semiconductor device fabrication company of the United States. It was founded by Leo and David Bakalar incorporated in Wakefield, Massachusetts, in 1952. David Bakalar was the president from 1952 to 1984. In 1986 the company went out of business, failing to keep pace with the rapid advances in technology.
The Boston Massacre Monument, also known as the Crispus Attucks Monument and Victory, is an outdoor memorial by Robert Kraus, installed in Boston Common, in Boston, Massachusetts, United States.
