George Rickey

Born in 1907 in South Bend, IN, George Rickey spent over five decades committed to the creation of poetic and precisely-calibrated sculptures that he referred to as his “useless machines.” Designed to be situated in the public sphere, the works are activated by their interplay with the surrounding environment, reshaping the landscape and bringing heightened attention to aspects of light, movement, and composition. Of all the natural forces, it was the wind’s movement that most captured Rickey’s imagination. He once wrote, “The artist finds waiting for him, as subject, not the trees, not the flowers, not the landscape, but the waving of branches and the trembling of stems, the piling up or scudding of clouds, the rising and setting and waxing and waning of heavenly bodies.”

After initially studying painting in Paris, Rickey returned to the US in 1930 and his career as a painter and muralist developed in the 30s and early 40s, completing works through the WPA and other public commissions. It was during his Army Air-corps War service that he rediscovered his long dormant natural aptitude for mechanics. Already in the mid ’30s he had seen Calder’s exhibition of mobiles in New York, however it was during the War that his thinking about a new and different kind of art began to shift. While familiarizing himself with gyroscopes on B-29 gunnery sights, other important memories were engaged from his youth that would have bearing on his artistic life’s work as a kinetic sculptor—such as the knife edge gimbal that kept the compass and stove level on his family’s yacht growing up in Scotland; and the simple mechanics of a pendulum seen in his grandfather’s clock-making shop as a young boy. In his war years, during free time in the workshop, he started experiments at first with Calder-esque mobiles and then little “machines;” later, other sculptures would be inspired by the movement of flowers, sedges, the clouds and stars in the wind.