ArtsEverywhere magazine is produced quarterly by the Community Foundation of St. Joseph County in partnership with the South Bend Tribune. Along with ArtsEverywhere.com and grantmaking to local arts organizations, the magazine is one of the three facets of the Foundation’s ArtsEverywhere Initiative, which supports and celebrates the arts in our community.

Why Rickey? Why Now? —from ArtsEverywhere magazine, May 2009

Coinciding with the start of South Bend’s 2009 Art Beat celebration, a treasure trove of beautiful stainless steel sculptures will appear on the streets of downtown. I promise that you won’t miss them: Each stands between 12 and 20 feet high, and, as you watch, you’ll notice that they move, gently, with the wind, their shiny metal surfaces reflecting flashes of sunlight back at you.

You’re looking at Innovation.

These sculptures are the work of artist George Rickey, one of the world’s most recognized kinetic sculptors. Beginning in September, our community will host Innovation: George Rickey Kinetic Sculpture, a year-long series of Rickey-related exhibitions and events that will feature these large sculptures. In collaboration with the City of South Bend, the Community Foundation of St. Joseph County will place the five works described above in a “Rickey Trail” through the heart of the downtown business district. The University of Notre Dame’s Snite Museum of Art—promised home to the Rickey archives and to more than a dozen of his sculptures—will convene a range of scholars in a symposium about Rickey and public sculpture, and will publish a catalog of his work. The South Bend Museum of Art will hold a major exhibition featuring more than 70 paintings, drawings, and sculptures that explore the artist’s life work.

Why Rickey? And why now?

First, George Rickey has a close personal connection to our community: He was born in South Bend. The son of a Singer Sewing Machine Company mechanical engineer and the grandson of a clock maker, Rickey assumed he’d be an engineer, too. But he became entranced by art—first by painting and later by the grace of kinetic sculpture. He took his knowledge of engineering (and, incidentally, sailing) and connected it to the art world, creating sleek, stainless steel sculptures that use the wind’s power to stay in fluid, ever-shifting motion.

Rickey’s story parallels our story in other ways, too.

In South Bend today, we’re reinventing ourselves through a new type of industry that we hope will take us beyond our Rust Belt past. It’s a return, in some ways, to the creativity of the Olivers, the Singers, and the Studebakers—with a twenty-first century emphasis on collaborating across disciplines.

That’s because true creativity doesn’t happen in isolation. For example, his fellow sculptor and friend David Smith, whom he worked with while teaching at Indiana University, helped Rickey develop the welding techniques he used to make his sculptures real. (Smith, incidentally, shared something else with Rickey: a connection to South Bend. The pioneering American sculptor worked as a riveter at Studebaker for a short time in the mid-1920s, learning to solder and spot-weld.) And the solid skills and knowledge of mechanical engineer Roland Hummel—a longtime collaborator and friend—helped Rickey create the enormous, multi-ton works for which he became best known.

At the center of our community’s reinvention is a collaboration with the University of Notre Dame and its new Innovation Park, the heart of an “innovation ecosystem” that will transform creative ideas into viable business ventures. These new ventures will be able to expand and develop in South Bend’s Ignition Park, an 83-acre site southeast of Sample and Chapin streets at the heart of the city’s former Studebaker Corridor. Together, Ignition Park and Innovation Park make up Indiana’s first two-site state-certified technology park—a partnership so noteworthy that it convinced the nation’s leading computer chip manufacturers to locate the Midwest Institute for Nanoelectronics Discovery (MIND) at Notre Dame, one of 30 research centers that competed for the honor.

To succeed in these efforts, we need to see the world the way George Rickey did: with an eye for the spaces between disciplines, whether those are art and engineering, biology and physics, computer science and mathematics, or biomedical science and engineering. That’s where the future lies, beyond yesterday’s silos.

While Innovation is in South Bend, Rickey’s works will inspire us on many levels, reminding us daily of the connections among art, science, and nature. Local teachers will find ways to incorporate Rickey into their curriculums, helping students understand principles of physics and natural sciences through these larger-than-life models. Artists will see the science in their art, and scientists will see the art in their science. And visitors from near and far will see our community’s commitment to our future alongside our respect for our rich past through the art of George Rickey, who understood the greatest innovations grow out of unlikely combinations.