In the episode “Work in Progress,” Spark visits with international artist Andy Goldsworthy as he installs “Drawn Stone” (formerly called “Faultline”) in the entrance courtyard of the new de Young Museum. The site-specific piece consists of carefully placed paving stones and boulders brought from a quarry in England and installed over the course of a few months in spring 2005.
Goldsworthy is an artist who creates artworks in the natural landscape using nature’s materials to form sculptural work of deceptive simplicity, often achieving amazing feats of balance and timing in the process. Whether ephemeral, permanent or designed to age with time, Goldsworthy’s works inspire quiet introspection about the beauty of the world as a living organism in a state of continuous change.
Across the expanse of the courtyard stones, a long crack draws visitors into the de Young Museum. Spark hears Goldsworthy’s vision and the challenges he faced in creating this major installation for the new building. Designed by the Swiss architecture firm Herzog & de Meuron and San Francisco’s Fong & Chan Architects, the building is scheduled to open in October 2005 in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco.
Goldsworthy is just one of the renowned artists to be offered commissions at the new de Young Museum, joining James Turrell, Gerhardt Richter and Kiki Smith. “Drawn Stone” is Goldsworthy’s fourth large-scale permanent commission, following “Stone River” (2001) at Stanford, “Garden of Stone” (2003) at New York’s Museum of Jewish Heritage and “Roof” (2004) at the National Gallery in Washington, D.C.
The original de Young Museum was a complex of buildings constructed between 1919 and 1965 that had suffered damage in the 1989 earthquake and was torn down in 2002. The de Young spent 10 years raising funds for a new facility to showcase its world-class collection of American paintings, decorative arts and crafts, art of Africa, Oceania and the Americas, and textiles. It also offers a wide range of education programs about these fields of art.
The paving stones Goldsworthy used in “Drawn Stone” are of Appleton Greenmoore sandstone, a stone imported from Yorkshire, England, where Goldsworthy was raised. The stone, with its rich orange and red colors from oxidized iron, was chosen to carry through the colors of the copper exterior of the new building.
Andy Goldsworthy holds a B.A. in fine art from Preston Polytechnic. He has produced numerous commissions and has had solo exhibitions internationally. He has received many awards, including the North West Arts Award, the Yorkshire Arts Award and the Northern Arts Award, which he won numerous times. In the 1980s, Goldsworthy began publishing books of photographs documenting his work. German director Thomas Riedelsheimer created a documentary about Goldsworthy in 2001 called “Andy Goldsworthy’s Rivers and Tides.”
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