George Rickey: born here, taken at six, brought back

1907 – 2002 · born in South Bend · the archive at Notre Dame

George Warren Rickey (1907–2002): the pioneer of kinetic sculpture, and the record's cleanest statement of a birth tie. He was born in South Bend on June 6, 1907, the son of an engineer and the grandson of a clockmaker, and the family moved to Scotland in 1913, when he was six. "I was snatched from South Bend at the age of six in 1913," he wrote on July 4, 1996, "and it was Notre Dame that brought me back." What he made in the life that followed was motion itself: stainless-steel forms — blades, rectangles, lines — set moving on engineered counterweights and bearings by nothing but air currents, the first of them shown at the Metropolitan Museum in 1951. In the Second World War he had designed machine-gun turrets for bombers; the engineering and the art were one trade.

The return: The return he named was real and repeated. In 1985 South Bend gave him a major retrospective — George Rickey in South Bend, with its catalogue by Charles E. Mullins and Tressa R. Herrera — placing his sculptures inside and outside the South Bend Art Center and at the Snite Museum, where he presented his work in person. In 2006 his foundation's agreement placed the George Rickey Sculpture Archive at Notre Dame: twenty sculptures for the museum, one of them for outdoor installation, and his papers — correspondence, engineering drawings, photographs, films and a database of his sculptures — for the University Archives. In 2009 the Snite's Innovations program set five of his outdoor sculptures along downtown South Bend's sidewalks, and the South Bend Museum of Art mounted George Rickey: Arc of Development. His works stand today in the Hayes Sculpture Park and the Raclin Murphy Museum — Four Rectangles Oblique of 1972 among them. Rickey died in Saint Paul, Minnesota, on July 17, 2002, aged ninety-five.

Sources:

1. Snite Museum of Art, "George Rickey" in Passages of Light and Time: George Rickey's Life in Light and Motion (2009) — Rickey's own statement of July 4, 1996; the 2006 archive agreement and its twenty sculptures and papers; the 1985 retrospective volume by Mullins and Herrera; and the 2009 downtown installations.
2. George Rickey chronology (Kasmin Gallery) — the June 6, 1907 South Bend birth, the 1913 move to Scotland, the 1951 Metropolitan showing, the 1985 South Bend retrospective, the 2009–10 South Bend Museum of Art exhibition, and the July 17, 2002 death.
3. Raclin Murphy Museum of Art, object record for Four Rectangles Oblique (1972) — the work's presence in the museum's collection.