George Rickey works on the Crucifera in East Chatham, New York, in 1965. The sculpture is now in the collection of Birmingham Museum of Art in Alabama. Photographer: Carl L. Howard, Ballston Lake, NY

George Rickey was born in South Bend, Indiana, in 1907; in 1913 his family moved to Scotland where his father, an engineer for the Singer Sewing Machine Company, had been transferred. Rickey studied in Scotland, Oxford, England, and Paris before returning to the United States. As a young man, Rickey sailed in the family's small yacht. Harnessing the wind while aboard the boat later influenced his sculpture and focused his artistic expression on "movement as means."

Rickey served in the US Army Air Corps in World War II and was assigned to work with engineers in a machine shop to improve aircraft weaponry, an experience that reawakened his earlier interests in science and technology. In the late 1940's Rickey spent a decisive year studying Bauhaus teaching methods at the Institute of Design in Chicago. This experience, combined with his memories of viewing Alexander Calder's mobiles in New York in the 1930s, caused Rickey to consider the idea of bringing together geometric form and movement. Rickey made his first kinetic sculpture using window glass in 1949 while working as an associate professor at Indiana University in Bloomington. He began making sculptures in earnest in 1950, and received numerous prizes and awards for mobiles and kinetic sculptures which used the laws of nature, wind power, and gravity.

In 1960, Rickey moved to East Chatham, New York, which remained his home until his death. He retired from teaching in 1966 after five years at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, but continued to make sculpture, and maintained studios in Berlin, Germany and Santa Barbara, California. Rickey's last sculpture—his tallest, measuring 57’ 1”—was installed at the Hyogo Museum in Japan in 2002.

Rickey received honorary doctoral degrees from nine institutions and was elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1974. In 1995 he was awarded the Gold Medal for Sculpture from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

In addition to the Snite Museum of Art and the South Bend Museum of Art, museums around the world house Rickey’s work, including the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC, the Hara Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo, the Tate Gallery in London, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.