AUDIO GUIDE TRANSCRIPT
NARRATOR:
In his later years, Calder focused primarily on large-scale public works. And of course, you can see one such work – The Eagle - here in Seattle in the museum’s Olympic Sculpture Park.
You’re looking at Mountains, a model for the “stabile” component of Calder’s massive 51-foot high work, Mountains and Clouds. A “stabile” is a stationary sculpture, in contrast to Calder’s moving sculptures, called “mobiles”. In the monumental work, the stabile is paired with a mobile, which hovers above it.
Calder made the full-sized sculpture for the Hart Senate Building in Washington D.C.. It was one of his last projects before his death in 1976.
The sculpture is made from sheet metal – one of Calder’s most favored materials.
KENNEDY YANKO:
Metal is one of the most fascinating materials in the world. You know, it's something that we are excavating from the ground. It's coming from the earth …
NARRATOR:
Kennedy Yanko is a painter and sculptor who works with metal.
KENNEDY YANKO:
…and it carries what it's known and what it's experienced. It's this amazing material that goes from a hard state to a liquid; and my relationship to this heavy, typically connotated as an industrial material is quite interesting because I watch it break like a twig. It actually becomes something that's delicate to me.
NARRATOR:
This late work is paired here with one of Calder’s earliest works, a wooden sculpture called Femme Assise, from 1929.
ALEXANDER S.C. ROWER:
I think that's really informative and quite interesting to have them together: you get a sense of a trajectory.
NARRATOR:
Alexander S. C. Rower is President of the Calder Foundation, and the grandson of the artist.
ALEXANDER S.C. ROWER (continuing):
And also, you get a sense of really the 20th century in terms of aesthetics, just in these two objects.
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