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 20^th century in terms of aesthetics, just in these two objects.