FREE admission with advance registration. In-person and open to the public. Advance registration required (limited seating available).   

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The twenty years following the end of WWII marked a profound period of synergy and exchange between sculpture and architecture in the United States. Leading modernist architects turned to a select group of artists, including Harry Bertoia, Alexander Calder, Richard Lippold, and Isamu Noguchi, to produce site-determined, large-scale commissions tailored for their buildings’ highly visible and well-traversed threshold spaces.

This talk considers how architectural design, notions of functionality, and the greater socio-historical context of the period impacted sculpture and examines how the medium’s brief alloying with architecture would impact the future of both disciplines, in ways still visible today.

About Marin Sullivan

Marin R. Sullivan (PhD, University of Michigan) is a Chicago-based art historian, curator, educator, and consultant. She is the Director of the Harry Bertoia Catalogue Raisonné, and co-curator of Harry Bertoia: Sculpting Mid-Century Modern Life, organized by the Nasher Sculpture Center. Sullivan specializes in the histories of modern and contemporary sculpture, especially its interdisciplinary, intermedial dialogues with photography, design, and the built environment. She is the author of Alloys: American Sculpture and Architecture at Midcentury (2022) and Sculptural Materiality in the Age of Conceptualism (2017) as well as numerous essays and articles in publications including American Art, Art History, History of Photography, the Journal of Curatorial Studies, and Sculpture Journal.