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Olympic Sculpture Park
Seattle Art Museum
Seattle WA – Jan 20-21, 2007
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Richard Serra, Wake (2004), 10 plates, 5 sets of locked toroid forms, weatherproof steel [Olympic Sculpture Park, Seattle Art Museum, Seattle WA, Jan 20-21, 2007
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Seattle's highly-anticipated Olympic Sculpture Park will open to the public this January. The innovative design, which reclaims an industrial site on the waterfront in downtown Seattle, was produced by the New York firm of Weiss/Manfredi Architects. Approximately twenty-two commissioned sculptures have been installed in the nine-acre park. They follow a zig-zag path that crosses Elliot Avenue and the Burlington Northern Railroad tracks to reach waterfront views of the Olympic Mountains and Puget Sound. In the park’s pavilion, a photo essay by Glenn Rudolph documents the site and its construction. Once completed, the park will be free and open all year round.
Ellsworth Kelly, Claes Oldenburg, Louise Nevelson, Mark Di Suvero and Anthony Caro are among the prominent artists whose works are on display. Most notable are Richard Serra’s Wake, a 300-ton set of steel plates and Alexander Calder’s Eagle, a bright red steel piece, which was formerly outside the Asian Art Museum in Volunteer Park. Mark Dion’s Seattle Vivarium fuses together elements of botanical science and education by taking a host log from the forest and encasing it in a greenhouse that allows viewers to observe fungi, lichen and insects developing in the active ecosystem. Interactive works, like Roy McMakin’s installation Love and Loss or Louise Bourgeois’ black granite Eye Benches, employ benches, tables and live trees to amplify the relationship between art, the environment and human emotion. Seattle Cloud Cover by Teresita Fernández forms a glass bridge over the railroad and can be viewed from below revealing saturated colour sky photographs sandwiched between glass.
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Aerial view of Seattle Art Museum's Olympic Sculpture Park during construction, with Richard Serra's Wake in the foreground, centre.
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www.seattleartmuseum.org
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