Passage I

George Rickey, Kinetic Sculptor

Though he started his art career as a painter, George Rickey (1907-2002) became fascinated with creating sculptures with moving parts. Eventually, one of the leaders in the new field of kinetic art. Today, his sculptures—which spin, tilt, shift, and sway—belong to private and public collections worldwide. (3)

To get an idea of Rickey's art, imagine a cluster of artistic cylinders standing in a grassy clearing. Attached to each shiny cylinder is a slender blade that moves in the slightest breeze. As the air current changes, the sculpture changes with it. Viewers witness art in motion, they are like a flock of elegant windmills.

Rickey was born in Indiana. The grandson of a clockmaker and the son of an engineer at a sewing machine company, however, the future artist grew up in a family with mechanical informational knowledge awareness. In college, Rickey studied history and art. After teaching for some years, he had began painting full time. During World War II, as a member of the Army Air Corps, he worked in a machine shop. This reexposure to mechanics pushed his art into the realm of moving parts, from two into three dimensions.

His early pieces of kinetic art were small, complicated forms that were displayed indoors. Over the years, his work increased in size, he simplified the forms, and started appearing outdoors. The changes, he said, reflected his efforts to focus on the essence of motion.

With a sophisticated understanding of gravity, Rickey worked with counterweights and bearings to create objects that move gracefully. His exploration of geometric figures—squares, circles, triangles, to name only a few. In this way, they were like the many artists of his day who worked primarily with abstract forms.

Rickey inspired a generation of sculptors many were his students: others knew only his work. His last and tallest sculpture, over fifty-seven feet high, was installed in Japan most months before his death at age ninety-five.