Search Results : rickey

George Rickey and his Kinetic Sculptures

 Posted by on October 23, 2012
Oct 232012
 

Sydney Walton Park

Two Open Rectangles
Eccentric Variation IV
Triangle Section
by George Rickey 1977

 George Rickey has several kinetic sculptures around San Francisco.

Rickey (1907-2002) was one of two major 20th-century artists to make movement a central interest in sculpture. Alexander Calder, whose mobiles Mr. Rickey encountered in the 1930’s, was the other. After starting out as a painter, Mr. Rickey began to produce sculptures with moving parts in the early 50’s, but it was not until a decade later that he achieved the kind of simplicity and scale that would make him an important figure in contemporary art. At that point, he began to produce tall stainless-steel sculptures with long, spearlike arms attached to central posts. Rotating on precision bearings devised by the artist, the arms were balanced so that slight breezes would cause them to sweep like giant scissor blades, tracing graceful arcs or circles against the sky. (From his NY Times Obituary)

The Apexer and Mona Caron Collaborate on Market Street

 Posted by on December 24, 2012
Dec 242012
 

1100 Market Street
Mid Market

This piece is by Ricardo Rickey, also known as the Apexer.  The flower is courtesy of Mona Caron.  Both Mona Caron and the Apexer have several murals around San Francisco.

 The mural is on the outside of a pop-up store called the Trailhead. Sprouting from the community-conscious and creatively driven minds at The Luggage Store, this new six-month-long pop-up shop includes an itsy-bitsy parklet of purchasable seedlings from the Tenderloin National Forest, mouth-watering pastries and sips by the folks at Farm:Table, art installations, and a denim-dominated workspace-slash-store managed by Holy Stitch! Denim Social Club.

This is the back of the store, where sadly the mural has been tagged.

Civic Center – Double L Excentric Gyratory

 Posted by on January 25, 2012
Jan 252012
 
Civic Center
San Francisco Public Library
 Double L Excentric Gyratory by George Rickey – 1982

The plaque reads – A gift from an immigrant Carl Djerassi to his adopted City.  Dedicated by San Francisco Arts Commission May 1997.

George Rickey was an American kinetic sculptor born on June 6, 1907 in South Bend, Indiana.  When Rickey was a child, his father, an executive with Singer Sewing Machine Company, moved the family to Helensburgh, Scotland. Rickey was educated at Glenalmond College and received a degree in History from Balliol College, Oxford. He spent a short time traveling Europe and studied art in Paris. He then returned to the United States and began teaching at the Groton School.  He died at his home in Saint Paul, Minnesota on July 17, 2002 at the age of 95.

George Rickey’s work has appeared in this website before.

Carl Djerassi is an Austrian-American chemist, novelist, and playwright best known for his contribution to the development of the first oral contraceptive pill.  In 1959 Djerassi became a professor of chemistry at Stanford University and the president of Syntex Laboratories in Mexico City and Palo Alto, California. The Syntex connection made Djerassi a rich man. He bought a large tract of land in Woodside, California, started a cattle ranch, and built up a large art collection. He started a new company, Zoecon, which focused on pest control without insecticides, using modified insect growth hormones to stop insects from metamorphosing from the larval stage to the pupal and adult stages. He sold Zoecon to Occidental Petroleum.

SOMA – Annular Eclipse

 Posted by on December 10, 2011
Dec 102011
 
SOMA
560 Mission Street
Annular Eclipse
George Rickey
George Rickey (1907 -2002)  built his career combining fundamental elements of nature and physics in the creation of his sculpture. His works include a broad vocabulary of geometric shapes and multiple devices for moving the elements in his sculpture, such as gimbals, pendulums and rotors.  Ricky constantly experimented with mechanical systems, but as he wrote in 1991, the drama in his sculpture “is in the movement, not the structure.  The means must disappear.”
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While I am beginning to find kinetic sculptures over done in the modern landscape, I love the parklet that this one sits in.  The Landscape Architect on this project was Christian Lemon while at the firm Hart Howerton.
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