George Rickey Foundation

60 years ago, the exhibition “George Rickey: Sixteen Years of Kinetic Art” opened at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, DC!
◽
Enjoy a look back at some of the works exhibited in the 1966 catalog from the George Rickey Foundation archives, and see some of the exhibited works in person as they now belong to public collections like the Baltimore Museum of Art, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Williams College, Storm King Art Center, Minneapolis Institute of Art, and the University of Notre Dame .

And so the seasons churn. 🍂◽ Autumn is here in the in the northern hemisphere!
_________________
George Rickey, “Space Churn with Spheres III,” 1972. Stainless steel. Baltimore Museum of Art.

“I realized that the form didn’t need to be a closed mass but could be a series of points or lines around which the mind makes an envelope.”
– George Rickey, quoted in Nan Rosenthal’s “George Rickey” (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1977).
______________
George Rickey, “Two Open Rectangles One Up One Down” (1978) in motion. Photos by Achim Pahle. George Rickey Foundation Archives.

Find George Rickey’s “Two Lines in a T Six Feet” in the Ogunquit Museum Of American Art’s special exhibition “American Conversations,” on view through November 15, 2026!
◽
In light of the United States’ 250th anniversary of its founding, the exhibition examines how artists have contributed to the ongoing dialogue surrounding the idea of “America” over the past 125 years. Each section pairs two works of art, inviting viewers to consider how artists across generations and backgrounds engage with themes central to American identity and experience.
In the introduction to the exhibition, the Museum pairs George Rickey (1907–2002) with Alexander Calder (1898–1976). What Calder set in motion with his mobiles, Rickey pushed even further in the field of kinetic sculpture.
“I had to wonder whether Calder had said it all; when I found he had not, I had to choose among the many doors I then found open. I had to learn to be a mechanic and to recall the physics I had learned at sixteen. I had to make an art in which every object had to be preconceived.”
– George Rickey, 1979
◽
Learn more about the exhibition at https://ogunquitmuseum.org/exhibition/american-conversations/.
_______________
Installation view of “American Conversations,” Ogunquit Museum of American Art. Photo by Luc Demers.

50 years ago in 1976, George Rickey’s six foot sculpture “Two Open Rectangles, Excentric Variation III” was stolen from Middlebury College sometime in the night from its setting in front of the Christian Johnson Memorial Building after being installed for just a week. Rickey remade the sculpture in 1978 as it was never returned nor found, but he decided to send a replacement to Middlebury College at an even larger scale of twelve feet to make it twice as hard to steal. The new piece, “Two Open Rectangles Excentric VI, Square Section,” stands today back in front of the Johnson Memorial Building.
◽
(Thieves if you’re reading this and your conscience has been nagging at you these 50 years, let us know where it is pretty please?)
______________________
(1) Newspaper clipping from The Middlebury Campus Newspaper, Volume LXXI, Issue 2, September 29, 1976.
(2) George Rickey, “Two Open Rectangles Excentric VI, Square Section,” 1976. Stainless Steel. Collection of the Middlebury College Museum of Art, Vermont. Purchase with funds provided by the Friends of Art Acquisition Fund and a matching grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, 1977.002. Photo by Middlebury College Museum of Art.

“I could try and reduce the elements to their simplest possible essence. And it is that which has led me to using linear forms, to try to eliminate everything that is not contributing to the movement.”
– George Rickey, quoted in Jeanne Siegal, “Artwords: Discourse on the 60s and 70s” (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1985).
________________
Photo of George Rickey by Carl Howard, 1967. George Rickey Foundation archives.