| George Rhoads | |
| Birth Name: | George Pitney Rhoads |
| Birth Date: | 27 January 1926 |
| Birth Place: | Evanston, Illinois, United States |
| Death Place: | Chinon, France |
| Education: | University of Chicago, Chicago Art Institute |
| Known For: | Audiokinetic sculptures, ball machines, origami, painting, wind sculpture |
| Notable Works: | 42nd Street Ballroom, Port Authority Bus Terminal, New York Newton's Daydream, Clark Planetarium, Salt Lake City, Utah Tower of Sisyphus, Chesapeake Energy Corporation, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma Having a Ball, Ontario Science Center, Toronto, Ontario University Hospitals, Cleveland, Ohio |
| Movement: | Kinetic art |
George Rhoads (January 27, 1926 – July 9, 2021) was a contemporary American painter, sculptor and origami master. He was best known for his whimsical audiokinetic sculptures in airports, science museums, shopping malls, children's hospitals, and other public places throughout the world.
Rhoads was born in Evanston, Illinois, the oldest of four children. His father, Paul S. Rhoads, was a physician and professor of internal medicine at Northwestern University. His mother, Hester Chapin Rhoads, was trained as an interior decorator.
Rhoads attended the University of Chicago with the goal of studying physics and mathematics. After earning enough credits to complete his associate degree, he began taking design and drawing classes at the Art Institute in Chicago. Two years, later he left Chicago and moved to New York City to become a painter. His work focused on portraits and impressionistic cityscapes, but he was not critically or financially successful.
In 1952, Rhoads moved to Paris to continue painting. It was there that he met the American origami expert Gershon Legman who introduced him to the art of origami and the work of Akira Yoshizawa. This meeting sparked Rhoads' interest and he began practicing origami and inventing new folds. His most notable contribution to the field became known as the Blintzed Bird Base, now a standard origami fold used for creating an animal with four legs, two ears and a tail from a single sheet of paper.
Rhoads created his first rolling ball machine in the late 1950s.[1]
In the 1960s, Rhoads began experimenting with kinetic sound-producing metal sculptures. As he described these early machines, "You have a whole range of things happening in succession. Little balls rolling down a track are the motive power that hits a hammer that hits a xylophone bar or blows a whistle." After seeing an exhibit of Rhoads' ball machines in Greenwich Village, the sculptor Hans Van de Bovenkamp hired him to invent devices to use in his metal fountains. Eventually, Rhoads began creating fountains of his own.
Rhoads continued to develop his audio-kinetic sculptures and his work gained national prominence after being fshown on The David Frost Show and Today. In the early 1970s, the shopping mall magnate David Bermant commissioned him to build audiokinetic sculptures for his shopping centers in Rochester, New York, and Hamden, Connecticut, and for years afterward continued to promote and sell Rhoads' work.[2]
Rhoads' sculptures became known for their precise clockwork-like mechanisms governed by weight and timing while still maintaining the appearance of spontaneity and randomness. He promoted the concept that the machine itself was a work of art, and his pieces were designed to demystify machinery and stimulate viewer reaction.[3] Modernist sculptor and Professor Emeritus at Princeton University, James Seawright, said of Rhoads' sculptures: "they embody almost every basic element of machinery, combined in a bewildering variety of ways. There's a level of mechanical genius behind inventing complex mechanisms."[4]
In response to the growing number of commissions, Rhoads partnered Robert McGuire to create his sculptures at RockStream Studios in Ithaca, New York. The studio and Rhoads' whimsical sculptures were later featured in an episode of the American children's television series, Mister Rogers' Neighborhood.[5] In 1981, Rhoads was commissioned to build a sculpture entitled 42nd Street Ballroom for the New York/New Jersey Port Authority Bus Terminal in New York City, which ushered in a period of production for larger, monumental ball machine sculptures.[6] In these large machines, chain-driven lifters carry balls to the top of the sculpture. Then, using only gravity, the balls travel down several different tracks that loop, twist and spiral. The balls trigger motion, hit objects, strike bells, gongs, chimes, drums and even xylophone bars, allowing each machine to create its own music. Once the ball reaches the bottom of the sculpture, it is lifted to the top and the process continues.
In 1990, Rhoads created a kinetic rolling ball sculpture titled Newton's Dream that was installed at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia. It was replaced with a pair of new machines, jointly titled Newton's Convergence, in 2017.[7]
Rhoads' sculptures have been installed in public spaces and private collections around the world.[6] The pieces range in size from small wall-mounted sculptures to machines that fill entire rooms and span multiple stories.[8] Some of his work belongs to permanent museum collections at institutions like the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Art Institute of Chicago.[3] Nearly all of his sculptures are still in operation and they have been noted for their popularity with the public.[6]
In 2007, Creative Machines (located in Tucson, Arizona) took over the creation of Rhoads' sculptures and continues the tradition of Rhoads' artwork. The company continues to use the techniques developed by Rhoads in its ball machine sculptures by incorporating similar fabrication methods, design elements and strategies for making reliable, long lasting sculptures.
Rhoads died at his son's home in Chinon, France, on July 9, 2021, at the age of 95.[9]