Robert Youngman | 1983 | Concrete 

This sculpture was commissioned by the Mitchell Foundation on the museum’s tenth anniversary. The artist designed the sculpture to celebrate the variety and wealth of the southern Illinois landscape.

The tall, vertical orientation of the piece refers to a section of the underground, the place where oil is discovered. The circular motifs represent oil cores, samples of the earth taken at specific depths for analysis. The cores are inspected for oil by geologists at the drilling site. The vast amount of cores depicted in Cedarhurst One may signify the fertile ground of the region.

There are additional motifs found in Cedarhurst One; the areas appearing to be peeled away earth may represent the erosion of time, a factor in the conservation of the land as a resource. The exposed areas may also address the altering of the ground to make way for highway construction.

*Cedarhurst Commission

Alexander Liberman | 1981 | Steel

Nature serves as Liberman’s aesthetic inspiration. According to the artist, “The whole ambition to create comes from looking at nature. The point is not to copy the forms, but to be inspired by the randomness and the monumentality of what surrounds us.” It is this sentiment that accounts perhaps for the underlying spiritual magnetism of his work as seen in Sabine Women I.

The circle has intrigued Liberman throughout the seven decades of his artistic career. Perhaps acting as a metaphor for continuity and the cyclical nature of life, the circle has offered Liberman a myriad of design possibilities.

The elliptical pieces in Sabine Women I were created by slicing steel gas storage tanks on an angle, while the remaining shapes were cut out of sheet steel. All of the pieces were thoughtfully arranged then skillfully welded together to produce a sculpture that appears light and airy. It is a dynamic composition of thrusting, rising, soaring, and swirling metal shapes.

*Gift of the Administrative Counselors

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