Marin R. Sullivan – författare

A new look at the interrelationship of architecture and sculpture during one of the richest periods of American modern designAlloys looks at a unique period of synergy and exchange in the postwar United States, when sculpture profoundly shaped architecture, and vice versa. Leading architects such as Gordon Bunshaft and Eero Saarinen turned to sculptors including Harry Bertoia, Alexander Calder, Richard Lippold, and Isamu Noguchi to produce site-determined, large-scale sculptures tailored for their buildings’ highly visible and well-traversed threshold spaces. The parameters of these spaces—atriums, lobbies, plazas, and entryways—led to various designs like sculptural walls, ceilings, and screens that not only embraced new industrial materials and processes, but also demonstrated art’s ability to merge with lived architectural spaces.Marin Sullivan argues that these sculptural commissions represent an alternate history of midcentury American art. Rather than singular masterworks by lone geniuses, some of the era’s most notable spaces—Philip Johnson’s Four Seasons Restaurant in Mies van der Rohe’s Seagram Building, Max Abramovitz’s Philharmonic Hall at Lincoln Center, and Pietro Belluschi and Walter Gropius’s Pan Am Building—would be diminished without the collaborative efforts of architects and artists. At the same time, the artistic creations within these spaces could not exist anywhere else. Sullivan shows that the principle of synergy provides an ideal framework to assess this pronounced relationship between sculpture and architecture. She also explores the afterlives of these postwar commissions in the decades since their construction.A fresh consideration of sculpture’s relationship to architectural design and functionality following World War II, Alloys highlights the affinities between the two fields and the ways their connections remain with us today.

Sculptural Materiality in the Age of Conceptualism is structured around four distinct but interrelated projects initially realized in Italy between 1966 and 1972: Yayoi Kusama’s Narcissus Garden, Michelangelo Pistoletto’s Newspaper Sphere (Sfera di giornali), Robert Smithson’s Asphalt Rundown, and Joseph Beuys’s Arena. These works all utilized non-traditional materials, collaborative patronage models, and alternative modes of display to create a spatially and temporally dispersed arena of matter and action, with photography serving as a connective, material thread within the sculpture it reflects. While created by major artists of the postwar period, these particular projects have yet to receive substantive art historical analysis, especially from a sculptural perspective. Here, they anchor a transnational narrative in which sculpture emerged as a node, a center of transaction comprising multiple material phenomenon, including objects, images, and actors. When seen as entangled, polymorphous entities, these works suggest that the charge of sculpture in the late postwar period came from its concurrent existence as both three-dimensional phenomena and photographic image, in the interchanges among the materials that continue to activate and alter the constitution of sculpture within the contemporary sphere.

Sculptural Materiality in the Age of Conceptualism is structured around four distinct but interrelated projects initially realized in Italy between 1966 and 1972: Yayoi Kusama’s Narcissus Garden, Michelangelo Pistoletto’s Newspaper Sphere (Sfera di giornali), Robert Smithson’s Asphalt Rundown, and Joseph Beuys’s Arena. These works all utilized non-traditional materials, collaborative patronage models, and alternative modes of display to create a spatially and temporally dispersed arena of matter and action, with photography serving as a connective, material thread within the sculpture it reflects. While created by major artists of the postwar period, these particular projects have yet to receive substantive art historical analysis, especially from a sculptural perspective. Here, they anchor a transnational narrative in which sculpture emerged as a node, a center of transaction comprising multiple material phenomenon, including objects, images, and actors. When seen as entangled, polymorphous entities, these works suggest that the charge of sculpture in the late postwar period came from its concurrent existence as both three-dimensional phenomena and photographic image, in the interchanges among the materials that continue to activate and alter the constitution of sculpture within the contemporary sphere.

A survey of the work of one of Chicago’s most prolific artists.Edgar Miller (1899–1993) arrived in Chicago in 1917 and, over the next fifty years, established a successful career as a multi-hyphenate creative practitioner. He worked as an architect, artist, craftsperson, curator, designer, and illustrator during a particularly rich period that saw the ascendancy of modernism across the visual culture of the city. Though aware of contemporary developments and debates, Miller’s tremendous body of work, which spanned multiple media, materials, and disciplines, speaks to an individual unconcerned with trends, labels, or what became the established tenets of modern art. While developing a signature style, he never embraced the aesthetics of geometric abstraction, “art for art’s sake,” subjective expressionism, or the machine age. He instead remained committed to figurative storytelling and representing the natural world, creating work that was intended to be experienced across the built environment.Published in conjunction with DePaul Art Museum’s 2024 retrospective of Miller’s work, Edgar Miller: Anti-Modern, 1917–1967 features new research by scholars Marin R. Sullivan, Craig Lee, and Jenn Marshall that serves to highlight one of Chicago’s most prolific and under-appreciated artists.

Best known for his wire sculptures, Hayward L. Oubre, Jr. (1916–2006), was an important Black American artist and educator, who has until now received little attention from scholars and museums. He created sculptures, paintings, and prints that tested the bounds of each of these mediums. These works share a previously untold history of American modernism rooted in the South. Academically-trained, Oubre worked with an everyday material—wire coat hangers—that led some early critics to associate his sculpture with folk art, despite wire rising to prominence as a material for modernist sculptors in this period.While making his art he also trained a subsequent generation of artists through his teaching, first at Alabama State College (now Alabama State University), from 1949 to 1965, and then at Winston-Salem State University, from 1965 to 1981, both Historically Black Colleges and Universities. Within Oubre’s story is a history of Alabama art shaping American art that has never been written. This new volume, and its accompanying exhibition, will begin to tell this story, laying the foundation for future projects on the work of Black artists in Alabama and the South.

This is the first book to set the work of British sculptor Lynn Chadwick (1914-2003) in its international context. Chadwick, a leading figure in modern British art and celebrated for his innovative steel and bronze sculptures of abstracted, expressive figures and animals, always felt that his work was better understood abroad than in his native country. In this richly illustrated monograph, distinguished British scholar and writer Michael Bird, and eminent American art historian and curator Marin R. Sullivan chart the different phases of Chadwick's long career. They vividly locate his art within the wider narrative of European and American post-war sculpture. They examine in particular the reception and promotion of Chadwick's sculpture in the United States, and how a collection of some 140 of his works at the Berman Museum in rural Pennsylvania came to be.

Italian-born American artist Harry Bertoia (1915-1978) was one of the most prolific, innovative artists of the post-war period. Trained at the Cranbrook Academy of Art, where he met future colleagues and collaborators Charles and Ray Eames, Florence Knoll, and Eero Saarinen, he went on to make one-of-a kind jewellery, design iconic chairs, create thousands of unique sculptures including large-scale commissions for significant buildings, and advance the use of sound as sculptural material. His work speaks to the confluence of numerous fields of endeavour, but is united throughout by a sculptural approach to making and an experimental embrace of metal.Harry Bertoia: Sculpting Mid-Century Modern Life accompanies the first U.S. museum retrospective of the artist's career to examine the full scope of his broad, interdisciplinary practice, and feature important examples of his furniture, jewellery, monotypes, and diverse sculptural output. Lavishly illustrated, the book offers new scholarly essays as well as a catalogue of the artists numerous large-scale commissions. It questions how and why we distinguish between a chair, a necklace, a screen, and a freestanding sculpture and what Bertoia's sculptural things, when taken together, say about the fluidity of visual language across culture, both at mid-century and now.