“Travel gives you a broader sense of what it means to be alive and make your way in the world.” – Alice Aycock
Hoop-La (Park Avenue Paper Chase), 2014 Powder coated aluminum and steel 19’ high x 17’ wide x 24’ long Temporarily installed at the Chatsworth House, Derbyshire, UK for Beyond Limits: Sotheby’s at Chatsworth, 2014 Courtesy Galerie Thomas Schulte Reproduced by permission of Sotheby’s
Art Basel is underway in Miami, Florida. As it draws to a close on Sunday, the Patricia & Phillip Frost Art Museum FIU will host its 12th annual Breakfast in the Park (9:30 a.m. to noon EST).
Speaking at the event will be American sculptor, Alice Aycock. Beyond the U.S., the artist's large-scale, architectural sculptures have been showcased in museums throughout Israel, Germany, The Netherlands, Italy, Switzerland and Japan. Some places to catch her site-specific installations include the National Gallery of Art, San Francisco Public Library, Brooklyn Museum, Museum of Modern Art in New York, Whitney Museum of American Art, Los Angeles County Museum, and the Louis Vuitton Foundation.
Leading up to Art Basel, Aycock took some time to talk to Change Your Life Travels about how her jaunts around the globe have impacted her art.
Cyclone Twist from Park Avenue Paper Chase, 2013 Powder coated aluminum, 27 feet high x 14 1⁄2 feet wide at widest point.Temporarily installed at the Chatsworth House, Derbyshire, UK for Beyond the Limits: Sotheby’s at Chatsworth. The sculpture will be part of Park Avenue Paper Chase in 2014. Courtesy Galerie Thomas Schulte, Berlin Reproduced by permission of Sotheby’s
In an interview with Jay Z’s Life+Times’ Off the Wall series, Alice Aycock recalls a windy, February night in her youth when she snuck out the window of her Harrisburg, Pennsylvania home. “I danced all nightlong in the wind,” she recalls. “It was probably one of the most euphoric moments of my life. …It was me, the night and the wind.”
Aycock credits that night as the beginning of her obsession, as an artist, with movement, wind and waves.
Maelstrom (Park Avenue Paper Chase), 2014 Painted aluminum 12’ high x 16’ w x 67’ longEdition of 2 The sculpture was installed between 52nd and 53rd streets on Park Avenue. Courtesy Galerie Thomas Schulte
Travels around the globe took Aycock to destinations such as Japan, Egypt, Europe, India, Thailand and Cambodia. Along the way, she discovered more fuel for her creative fire. “The architecture of the world has been very inspiring,” she says. “There are some observatories in India that have been very significant to me.”
Waltzing Matilda (Park Avenue Paper Chase), 2014 Reinforced fiberglass 15’ high x 15’ wide x 18’ long The sculpture was installed at 56th street on Park Avenue. Courtesy Galerie Thomas Schulte Photo: Dave Rittinger
In many ways, travel brought its own education to Aycock. “When you’re widely traveled you’re not quite as provincial, you know there are other points of view, other ways to live and other opinions. Travel gives you a broader sense of what it means to be alive and make your way in the world.”
One city, though, immediately claimed Aycock as its own. New York. “It’s the only place I’ve really ever felt at home,” she admits. “I like to say it’s very deep in my DNA.”
Now, at age 69, she’s spent more than half her life in New York. What continues to enthrall her – “The city is always changing, constantly shifting.”
She points to a 2014 art installation series on Park Avenue from 52nd to 57th Streets as an “expression of how I feel about the city and its energy.”
Her description of New York is almost like that of a love affair: “Tumultuous, chaotic vibrant celebratory.”
Twin Vortexes (Park Avenue Paper Chase), 2014 Painted aluminum 12’ high x 12’ w x 18’ long
Edition of 2 The sculpture was installed at 54th street on Park Avenue. Courtesy Galerie Thomas Schulte
Aycock's worldview has evolved with time and travel. One thing she remains steadfast about: “We're extraordinarily fortunate to be living at a point in history where we know more about the universe, ourselves and how we came to be, than at any other time.”
Timescape #3, 2015 Aluminum 4’6” high x 5’8” wide x 2’ deep Edition of 3 + 1AP (To be installed at the Frost Art Museum 12/2015)
Recently, a quote from Aycock was included in Change Your Life Travels’ Love Notes to Paris series.
The artist recalled a time in the 1990s when she taught at the Ecole des Beaux Arts while in residence at Paris' Cartier Foundation for the Arts in Jouy-en-Josas.
That quote could very well stand as a directive for the world to follow: "Whatever it is in us as human beings that reaches for the marvelous and extraordinary is, at this point, at stake. In the end, we have to have the courage to go for what is good in us."
To learn more about Alice Aycock visit http://www.aaycock.com/. For more information about the Frost Art Museum go to https://thefrost.fiu.edu/. To see what's happening during Art Basel visit https://www.artbasel.com/miami-beach.
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