George Rickey, the contemporary sculptor who created the kinetic structure standing on Rensselaer’s Hassan Quad, Six Random Lines Eccentric, died recently at the age of 95. Rickey was well-known for his use of movement to enhance the beauty of sculpture.
“I’ve always thought of his sculptures as some of the most exciting I’ve seen ... He really understood the technology that he worked with: the materials, the wind, the sun,” said David Haviland, vice president of Institute advancement and a former student of Rickey’s.
Despite suffering from prostate cancer, Rickey remained active professionally until May, when he completed his last drawing.
Much of his later work is still being organized for public display. The largest and tallest of Rickey’s kinetic sculptures, at 57 feet one inch high, was installed at the Hyogo Museum in Kobe, Japan on March 30. Many of the charcoal portraits from his later years will soon be on display at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C, according to The Times Union.
Rickey lived in East Chatam, NY—a town in the Capital Region—since the ’60s, before moving near the home of his son Philip in St. Paul, Minnesota last year.
In 1960 Rickey joined the RPI faculty as an adjunct professor of art in the School of Architecture. He retired from teaching in 1966 and later received an honorary doctorate in fine arts from Rensselaer. “He had a great way of talking about the work you were doing ... that made it very clear to the student ... He was an excellent critic,” said Haviland.
Rickey’s pieces are most known for their representation of geometric zigzagging arms and machinelike engineering. His sculptures have “very simple geometric forms [that] reflect the natural environment” using a “variety of different images,” said his son.
In addition to the sculpture at RPI, Rickey’s works can be seen on display at Empire State Plaza, the Albany Institute of History and Art, the Albany International Airport, and more than 220 other public exhibitions and private collections around the world.
Rickey was born in South Bend, Ind. but spent the majority of his childhood in Helensburgh, Scotland, where his father, a machine engineer at Singer sewing, was transferred when he was only five. While taking courses in drawing and painting at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art, Rickey studied modern history and played rugby at Oxford University’s Balliol College.
Upon graduating from Oxford, Rickey left for Paris to study art at the academy of cubist Andre L’Hote, and later at the Académie Moderne with painters Fernand Leger and Amde Ozenfant.
He painted from 1930 until the late 1940s, when the Russian constructivist movement inspired him to create moveable sculptures. During that time Rickey supported himself financially as a copy editor and instructor of art and design at a number of U.S. universities and colleges, including Boston’s Groton School.
Throughout his career, Rickey has received numerous awards in recognition of his art, including a Lifetime Achievement in Contemporary Sculpture Award from the International Sculpture Center in Washington in 1999, a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1960 and 1961, and the NYSCA Governer’s Art Award in 1975.
Rickey created his first kinetic sculpture out of glass in 1949, based on the works of surrealistic sculptor Alexander Calder. During the 1950s, Rickey’s work became increasingly more abstract, however, and he began to create geometric patterns based on blades swinging in the wind. “The sculpture does not represent nature,” said Rickey in a catalogue statement at the Hayward Gallery’s exhibition of art in 1970. “It is nature—nature’s forces at work in the air ... in gravity, in friction, in the laws of motion.”
