Collaboration and Innovation -from ArtsEverywhere magazine, August 2009

by Andrew S. Hughes

Abstract sculpture, unlike representational art, can be hard to love. Some viewers find abstract sculpture inaccessible, and response to the work of artists such as Mark di Suvero, David Smith, and Seymour Lipton often descends—justly or not—to the level of Is it art?

That’s not the case with the work of George Rickey, one of the world’s most prominent kinetic sculptors. A South Bend native who was the son of a Singer Sewing Machine mechanical engineer and the grandson of a clockmaker, Rickey connected his knowledge of engineering to the art world and created sculptures with inarguable universal appeal. They’re sleek, stainless steel pieces that move with the wind, reflecting flashes of sunlight as they form and reform. Rickey’s sculptures are enticing; they draw you into their own sense of time and space.

As art critic Valerie Fletcher points out in a recent essay written in honor of Innovation, “Rickey’s works appeal to nearly everyone who watches them for more than a few minutes.”

His largest pieces, such as the five coming to downtown South Bend for Innovation: George Rickey Kinetic Sculpture exhibition, weigh many tons—a detail that makes their graceful motion particularly impressive. Although Rickey understood engineering principles, he needed a trained engineer to certify his designs were safe for placement in public spaces. For this, he turned to Roland Hummel, a fellow professor he met while teaching at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in the 1960s. The two worked together regularly from 1966 until Rickey’s death in 2002, combining their respective areas of expertise into stable, breathtaking sculptures that sometimes stood as tall as 20’.

Even today, their collaboration continues: Hummel designed the footings that will be used to hold the sculptures in place for Innovation.

Recently, ArtsEverywhere spoke with Roland Hummel, 90, by phone from his home in upstate New York about George Rickey and their work together.

In ’66, when he retired from Rensselaer, he was getting bigger and bigger commissions—commissions for bigger pieces—and they were going into public places, and so he had to have some assurance that they were safe, that they wouldn’t collapse and fall on people. That’s when he asked me would I work with him, which I did. ...And then when I retired in ’89, for the next 13 years, I worked virtually full time for George because he became more and more active and got more and more commissions for larger and larger pieces, so it became more of a challenge.

One of the things that made working for George easy was that he had a real understanding and feel for what was appropriate in sculpture. He would not come up with a design which just could not be built.

I had other experiences, where people, especially one sculptor wanted to do something, and I said, “You just can’t do that.” Well, he didn’t believe me, so he went to another engineer and the piece was built. About three weeks after it was in place, it collapsed, but it was so obvious that it was going to collapse. I don’t know who the other engineer was, but he apparently didn’t realize what he was doing.

But George, that was rarely the case. Occasionally, he would come up with an idea, and I’d say, “Let me check it out,” and I would say, “These would be the sizes of the bearings and the posts and the footings that are required,” and he would say, “That’s a little heavier than I would like,” so we abandoned the idea, but that was rare. ...

He had a real feel for this. This came partly from all his experience making smaller pieces and then making them larger. He certainly learned from those experiences. ... He was the most Renaissance man I’ve ever known.

What do you mean by that?

He had such a broad knowledge of history. He’s one of the few people that I have known who was reasonably articulate with numbers, but he was very articulate as a writer. He used to write many articles and give talks that were very good. He was well-rounded. I know very competent engineers, but they cannot write and they cannot speak, and I’m an example. [Laughs.] I know many writers and poets and musicians that know that aspect, but they know very little about mathematics, so I think those are two different things, and it’s unusual to have them found in one person. That’s one of the reasons I found it such a pleasure to work with George.

Over the course of all those years working together, did the two of you end up socializing, as well? What was he like as a person?

He was very good as a social person. Of course, his wife was especially wonderful, his wife Edie. She was always the center of attention at every party, and not only that, she was probably the best cook I’ve ever known.

In fact, there’s a story that [when] George was...a painter working in New York City, and this lady came as a model, and he painted her or sketched her or whatever he did, and afterwards, she said, “Are you hungry?” He said, “Yes.” She said, “Let’s cook up something,” and she cooked up something so wonderful, he said, “I’m going to marry you.” I don’t know how true the story is, but she was a marvelous cook.

In fact, he was a pretty good cook himself, because there were years, I forget how many years, when he and his wife spent their winters in Germany—they had a studio there, an apartment—and all through those years, we’d have to correspond by letter as he was having new ideas and pieces that I worked on. He would come back to the States once every six weeks and spend a week at the studio to keep things running smoothly and answering questions. I would go down when he was home for that week, and I’d work with him until five or six, and then he would cook, and he was very good. … Of course that’s the time when we would, after we ate and had a few drinks, he would talk, and it was just fascinating to hear him talk. He could relate so many events that I had a vague idea about, but it wasn’t vague for him at all.

How large was the studio in terms of employees? How many people did it take to really make one of these sculptures?

In the summer, his crew would expand to maybe 12 people. Many of them were art students from colleges and worked just for the summer. Then he had his regular staff of about five people year-round, and of course, he had an office crew of at least two people to keep the records, so it was a very active community.

The group there, they loved to have parties. In fact, they had a party for me just about a month ago for my birthday, because George’s birthday and my birthday were only a week apart, so they would always have a joint birthday party, and they would invite all the people that supplied materials—so several machinists, because to make the parts for the bearings and the shafts, they had to use machinists, and there were several machinists in the neighborhood that were used. It was quite an event, especially the Christmas party.

What did each of you do in the creation of the works? Where do art and engineering meet in the sculptures?

Well, you’ve seen photographs of things that he had done? Well, they all have to be supported on a post, so the size of the post has to be determined: the dimensions, the thickness, the taper. There has to be a footing plate to bolt the sculpture to a footing, and at the top of the post where the pieces rotate, there has to be a mechanism to support the bearings and the shaft. The size of those all had to be determined.

When he was working with small pieces, before I got involved, he knew from experience about what he needed for the size of the shaft and bearings to use and what size post and so forth, and he worked on his experience. On the big pieces, not only did he legally have to have a professional engineer, but even for his own satisfaction, he wanted to be sure they were reasonably safe.…

He would come to me with a sketch, generally. He drew wonderfully. He was a wonderful artist. The sketches were always so clear. He didn’t put any sizes, for example, of the post. He didn’t say it has to be six by six or anything else. I would then determine those things. Occasionally, he would make a maquette, which is a model, a small model, of what he planned to do. He would do this also for his own satisfaction, so he could move the parts of the model to see how they relate. Sometimes, I would work from that, but generally, it was from drawings that he would make.

In general, how involved were you with the actual construction? What was that like to observe and be part of physically?

Of course, I never welded a piece, so I had, physically, very little to do with the actual fabrication, but I would go to—on the very large pieces, he had to have some of the parts fabricated away from his studio because he didn’t have big enough equipment to handle it. Then, of course, I would go to those fabricators and check with them to see that they’re doing what we had specified. Of course, I made all the workman drawings for these people to go by, so in his archives, there are thousands of my drawings showing what the parts are and their sizes. Sometimes, I would give him alternative sizes or shapes for the various parts and let him decide which he thinks would fit his idea or be the most attractive in his mind, whether to use a round post or a square post, as examples.

Did he ever have to alter designs based on what you told him what could or could not be done? As you said, he had a good sense of that.

It was a rare case, where after he showed me his design and then I made preliminary calculations, and then I would tell him what sizes I thought were appropriate, it was rare, but he said, “If it’s going to be that big, I don’t want to make it if it’s going to look that heavy.” He wanted the thing to look slender. It was something like the aircraft industry, to make the piece as slender as possible. We did wind tunnel tests sometimes to determine the drag on the form that he was using. We never did it to the extent that the aircraft people do. They spend millions of dollars in wind tunnel work.

One of the interesting things I found in the wind tunnel test was that if we would put a piece in the wind tunnel and, of course, turn on the wind, the air, the pieces were very dull because they were under constant wind. They would just keep repeating the same thing over and over and over, but out in nature, the wind varies in speed and direction, and that’s what’s so fascinating about his pieces. I’ve had some of his pieces for 20 years, and I look at them every day, and it never becomes dull. They’re always doing something you wouldn’t expect.

Andrew S. Hughes is the arts and entertainment editor at the South Bend Tribune.