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Sarah Sze: Blue Poles (2006)

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Blue Poles (2006)
Sarah Sze

Blue Poles (2006)
Sarah Sze

Blue Poles (2006)
Sarah Sze

Blue Poles (2006) by sculptor and MacArthur Fellow Sarah Sze is a new commission for the Sidney-Pacific Graduate Residence. A committee of MIT student residents, faculty, and dormitory staff helped to select this work as a part of MIT's Percent-for-Art Program, which is administered by the MIT List Visual Arts Center. Sze has designed a work composed of a series of modular ladder-like structures, that join together and are installed both inside and outside the 6-storey building façade starting at the entrance canopy. Her works are often site-specific sculptures that utilize pre-fabricated materials to construct fantastic and provocative responses to functional spaces. Sze’s works usually do not stand alone, but effectively infiltrate the space they inhabit.

Sze, who grew up in Boston, notes that this work was inspired in part by the fire escapes that she observed stretching across the fronts and backs of tenement apartment buildings. Providing both a means for escape in case of disaster and a place to hang out that is simultaneously inside and outside, fire escapes add a human dimension to the urban landscape. Newer, more modern buildings, like those on the MIT campus, eschew this old-fashioned safety system for more invisible means of escape. Thus, by fusing this jumble of ladders onto a sleek glass facade, Sze joins two apparently antithetical architectural styles. In the process, she offers a subtle critique of the dehumanizing quality of much contemporary architecture and design.

The title refers to a well-known painting Blue Poles (1952) by the American abstract-expressionist artist Jackson Pollock. Sze writes, “I decided to name the piece out of my love of the Pollock painting to emphasize the intuitive gestural side of the work, and its relationship to color and form”.

About the Artist:

Born in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1969, Sarah Sze holds a BA from Yale University and an MFA from the School of Visual Arts in New York. Sarah Sze‘s solo exhibitions include those at Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York (2005 and 2000); The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2003); the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (2002); Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (1999); Institute of Contemporary Art, London, and the musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (1998); and White Columns, White Room, New York (1997). In 2005, Sze created An Equal and Opposite Reaction as a permanent installation for the Seattle Opera in Seattle, Washington. She also has participated in group exhibitions all over the United States and at such international venues as the Bienal de São Paulo, Brazil; the Venice Biennale, Venice, Italy; the Carnegie International, Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, PA; and the Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art, NY. Sarah Sze has received numerous awards and honors including a MacArthur Fellowship and a Lotos Club Foundation Prize in the Arts (2003); as well as awards from Atelier Calder, Saché, France, and the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation (1999); and The Marie Walsh Sharpe Foundation, Rema Hort Mann Foundation, and Paula Rhodes Memorial Award (1997).