Outdoor Sculpture

Mark di Suvero
United States, born 1933
Painted steel


Mark di Suvero
United States, born 1933

Born in Shanghai, China, to parents of Italian heritage, Mark di Suvero moved to the United States in 1941 and began creating large-scale sculptures in the early 1960s. Like many of di Suvero’s pieces, Shang is a kinetic sculpture that features a suspended platform that swings, an indication of his interest in the technical engineering of his large-scale sculptures. The overall form of the sculpture is reminiscent of a large abstracted Asian character, or perhaps the entrance to a Japanese Shinto temple. Its title refers to the Shang dynasty (1600–1046 BCE) and serves as a tribute to the country of his birth, while at the same time speaking to China’s dramatic increase in the consumption of steel in recent years.

Beverly Pepper
United States, born 1924
Ternary Marker
Cast bronze
Gift of Jack A. and Noreen Rounick

In the late 1950’s Beverly Pepper, who had trained as a painter, began to experiment with sculpture. In the decades that followed, she produced a body of work that is remarkably varied, ranging from intimate tabletop sculptures to monumental outdoor works and site-specific environmental projects that merge with the landscape. During the 1980s her sculptural style emphasized surface treatment and machine-tooled production. Her affinity for the shape and form of industrial equipment stems from years spent in factories fabricating her own sculpture.

Ternary Marker is part of a series of sculptures Pepper has called “urban altars,” which combine a totemic presence with simple archetypal forms. The title alludes to its three main parts: a pyramid and inverted triangle capped by a wedge shape reminiscent of an ancient tool or ritual object. The cumulative effect of these geometric shapes is somehow anthropomorphic. Pepper’s “urban altars” are a kind of archaeological minimalism that maintains a vital dialogue between past and present, primitive and industrial.

Lucas Samaras
United States, born 1936
Stiff Box No. 12
Cor-Ten steel
Gift of the Lannan Foundation in Honor of the Pelham Family



—Lucas Samaras


Erwin Binder
United States, 1934–1993
Gift of Jack A. and Noreen Rounick

A veteran of the United States Air Force, Erwin Binder learned to cast metal and work with stone as an employee at his family's jewelry business. Wanting to develop these skills further, he enrolled at the Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles and subsequently produced numerous public sculptures throughout Southern California in the 1970s and 1980s. Requiem was commissioned by Bob Hope and the Mayor of Burbank on behalf of a collection of “Proud Patriots” who wanted to erect a tribute to “Defenders of the Constitution, Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow.” Reminiscent of the later work of Henry Moore or Jacques Lipchitz, Requiem is typical of Binder's lyrical, abstract style, which always maintained vestiges of figuration. Here, his sinuous, bulbous bronze shapes recall an eternal flame that is meant to memorialize fallen heroes. The title of the piece reveals the artist's interest in addressing broad, humanistic themes. With its wing-like grace and beauty suggesting freedom of flight, Requiem serves as a token of remembrance and commemoration to members of the armed forces and the American people.

Michele Oka Doner
United States, born 1945
Angry Neptune, Salacia, and Stride
Cast bronze

In her recent sculptural work, the artist (and University of Michigan alumna) Michele Oka Doner has returned to making monumental, figural sculptures—a return that has been characterized as heroic at a time when life-sized sculpture has long been critically out of favor. The three monumental figures placed between the Museum and Tappan Hall to the east are at once dense and fragmented, the thick undergrowth of texture revealing inner voids and complex strands of bronze of extraordinary technical complexity. Majestic yet seemingly crippled, these headless forms—hand burnished and patinated by the artist—evoke ancient, fossilized totems, their surface scarrings suggestive of the decay both of natural forces and of passing time. The artist has a long-standing interest in the natural world, and the three figures positioned here in a kind of timeless, abstracted conversation, ask us to consider the sacred qualities of nature.

Charles Ginnever
United States, born 1931
Cor-Ten steel
Museum purchase made possible by the Thirtieth Anniversary Project and the National Endowment for the Arts

Daedalus is one of a series of works Ginnever created during the mid-1970s with titles drawn from classical mythology. Daedalus is the hero of Greek legend who, with his son Icarus, escaped King Minos’s prison on the island of Crete by fashioning a pair of wings out of wax and feathers. Icarus, thrilled by his newfound freedom, refuses to heed his father’s warnings and flies too close to the sun, which melts his wax wings as he falls to his death. The myth of Daedalus and Icarus functions as a cautionary tale against hubris and emphasizes the importance of heeding parental warnings.

Daedalus’s arched footprint and fan of flat planes evoke the shape of a wing in mid-flight. As in much of Ginnever’s work from this period, the open arrangement of geometric forms encourages the viewer to move around the piece. As one circumnavigates it, the sculpture’s formal simplicity at first becomes clear, then it appears to change shape.