Artwork Details
- Title
- Big Bling
- Artist
- Martin Puryear (b. 1941)
- Year
- June – November 2017, Philadelphia
- Location
- Not on view
- Medium
- Pressure-treated laminated timbers, plywood, chain-link fence, fiberglass, and gold leaf
- Dimensions
- Height 40'
Artwork Description
Big Bling has officially been installed at MASS MoCA in North Adams, Massachusetts. Thank you to all of our partners and everyone who supported this project in Philadelphia!
The Association for Public Art (aPA), working with New York’s Madison Square Park Conservancy in a first-time collaboration, brought internationally acclaimed artist Martin Puryear’s Big Bling to Philadelphia as a temporary installation. The sculpture was commissioned by Madison Square Park Conservancy, New York, and was first exhibited by the contemporary art program, Mad. Sq. Art.
Big Bling was installed along Philadelphia’s Kelly Drive, between Fountain Green Drive and the Connecting Railway and Girard Avenue Bridges, and was on view from June – November 2017. The sculpture was located near Daniel Chester French and Edward C. Potter’s General Ulysses S. Grant, Frederic Remington’s Cowboy, and Carl Milles’ Playing Angels, which were installed by aPA in 1898, 1908, and 1972, respectively.
Rising forty feet high and eliciting many interpretations, Big Bling is Puryear’s largest temporary outdoor sculpture to date. The colossal multi-tiered wood structure is wrapped in chain-link fence and anchored with a gold-leafed shackle near the top. Layers of laminated timbers and plywood stack together to create a form that is both animal-like and abstract with an amoeboid shape in the center. “I tend not to tell people what they’re looking at when they’re in the presence of my work,” says Puryear. “I trust people’s eyes. I trust their imagination.”
Philadelphia is home to one of Puryear’s early public works, Pavilion in the Trees. Pavilion was conceived in 1981 as part of the Form and Function program of the Association for Public Art (known then as the Fairmount Park Art Association) and installed at the Fairmount Park Horticulture Center in 1993. Inspired by the universal longing for a treehouse, Pavilion consists of an open structure that uses materials similarly found in Big Bling. The work has become a favorite destination to relax and contemplate nature from a bird’s-eye view.
About the Artist
Martin Puryear (American, b. 1941) has created a body of work that defies categorization, creating sculpture and works on paper that examine identity, culture, and history. Puryear’s sculpture combines modernist abstraction with traditions of crafts and woodworking in shapes informed by the natural world and by ordinary objects. In the 1960’s he volunteered with the Peace Corps in Sierra Leone (1964-66), where he schooled himself in the region’s indigenous crafts, and his interest in Scandinavian design led him to study at the Swedish Royal Academy of Art (1966-68). He earned his B.A. from Catholic University of America, Washington, D.C. (1963) and his M.F.A. from Yale University (1971).
Puryear’s 2007 retrospective was organized by The Museum of Modern Art, New York and traveled to the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. An exhibition of his drawings, Martin Puryear: Multiple Dimensions, was recently on view at New York’s Morgan Library & Museum (2015-2016).
Puryear has received many distinguished awards, including the Skowhegan Medal for Sculpture (1980), a Louis Comfort Tiffany Grant (1982), and a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship (1989). He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters (1992) and was awarded an Honorary Doctorate from Yale University (1994). In 2017 he was awarded the Association for Public Art’s historic Medal of Honor.
Puryear lives and works in the Hudson Valley region of New York.
Artwork Credits
Presented by the Association for Public Art in collaboration with Madison Square Park Conservancy
Commissioned by Madison Square Park Conservancy, New York
First exhibited by the contemporary art program, Mad. Sq. Art
Artwork Media
Museum Without Walls
Voices:
BROOKE KAMIN RAPAPORT is the Director and Martin Friedman Senior Curator of Mad. Sq Art at Madison Square Park Conservancy in New York City.
DR. KELLIE JONES is Associate Professor in Art History and Archaeology and the Institute for Research in African American Studies (IRAAS) at Columbia University.
MICHAEL HURWITZ is a fine furniture designer and friend of artist Martin Puryear.
MARTIN PURYEAR is the artist who created Big Bling. He is heard on archival tape courtesy Art 21, Inc.
Producer: Anne Hoffman
Video clips: Greenhouse Media
Photos: James Ewing Photography