Alice Aycock facts for kids

Another Twister (João)

Alice Aycock, born on November 20, 1946, is an American artist known for her amazing sculptures and art installations. She was one of the first artists to create "land art" in the 1970s. This means she made art using the natural environment. Alice Aycock has also created many huge metal sculptures that can be seen all over the world. Her art often mixes ideas from architecture, machines, and even science, showing off her logic, imagination, and a bit of magic!

Biography

Alice Aycock was born in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. She studied at Douglass Residential College in New Brunswick, New Jersey, and earned her first degree in 1968. She then moved to New York City and got her Master of Arts degree in 1971 from Hunter College. There, she learned from the famous sculptor Robert Morris.

Alice Aycock's Artworks

Early Land Art Creations

Alice Aycock's first artworks were often connected to nature and the environment. She would build sculptures directly into or onto the land. These "environmental sculptures" explored ideas about private spaces, enclosed areas, and how our bodies relate to buildings and structures around us. Her land art often invited people to explore and discover things. These early works were not meant to last forever because they were made from natural materials and were not maintained. Her art has been compared to ancient labyrinths and Greek temples.

One of her most famous land art pieces is Maze (1972). She built it on Gibney Farm in Pennsylvania. Maze was a large circle, 32 feet wide, made of five wooden rings, each six feet tall. There were three openings to enter. Once inside, people were meant to feel a bit lost as they tried to find their way to the center. Alice Aycock was inspired by how a compass works and by an essay that suggested the center of the universe is wherever you are standing.

Alice Aycock said about Maze:

Originally, I had hoped to create a moment of absolute panic—when the only thing that mattered was to get out...Like the experience of the highway, I thought of the maze as a sequence of body/eye movements from position to position. The whole cannot be comprehended at once. It can only be remembered as a sequence...I took the relationship between my point of entry and the surrounding land for granted, but often lost my sense of direction when I came back out. From one time to the next, I forgot the interconnections between the pathways and kept rediscovering new sections.

Other early works, like Low Building with Dirt Roof (1973) and A Simple Network of Underground Wells and Tunnels (1975), also involved shaping natural landscapes by adding man-made structures underground. Alice Aycock was one of the few women artists working in this style during that time.

She also created art for galleries that showed a sense of danger. For example, Sand/Fans (1971 and again in 2008) featured four large industrial fans blowing on a pile of 4,000 pounds of sand. In the original 1971 piece, the fan blades were uncovered, which made people feel a bit scared. In the 2008 version, the blades were caged for safety. The way the fans moved the sand showed her interest in nature and science. She thought the fans would create a sand twister, but instead, they made ripples like waves.

Large-Scale Sculptures and Public Art

Around 1977, Alice Aycock's art started to change. She became more interested in big ideas about how the world works. Her sculptures became more like theatrical stage sets and explored science, technology, and even spiritual ideas. These new sculptures were not meant for people to walk through.

The Machine That Makes the World (1979) was a key artwork that showed this change. It marked the beginning of her work on huge sculptures and public art pieces that would be seen by many people over the next few decades. In 1979, she also finished How to Catch and Manufacture Ghosts. This artwork was inspired by the 1800s idea that electricity could bring things to life, like in Mary Shelley’s book Frankenstein. This artwork used wood, glass, water, lights, metal containers, and even a lemon battery connected to a bird in a bottle!

After 1982, her art often featured "blade machines"—sculptures with spinning, motorized metal blades. Her art of "cosmic machines" has been compared to stories by Jorge Luis Borges, which explore ideas about the mind, dreams, space, and time. Like Borges, Aycock's art can make us think about a higher order that we try to understand but can't fully grasp.

In the 1990s, Alice Aycock started using more advanced engineering and creating permanent sculptures for public spaces. She also began using computer software to design her drawings and plan her sculptures. She said about her work with architecture:

"What I am trying to do is to take normal architectural language and make it disjunctive."

Her recent work includes very large sculptures based on natural shapes, computer science, physics, and other modern ideas. She uses high-tech materials to create complex sculptures in public places. In 2005, Ramapo College showed her artwork called Starsifter, Galaxy, NGC 4314. This 30-foot-long sculpture was named after a galaxy located 40 million light-years from Earth, which has been photographed by the Hubble Space Telescope.

In 2014, her piece Park Avenue Paper Chase was installed along Park Avenue in New York City. It included seven very large sculptures made of aluminum and fiberglass. These were some of the biggest sculptures ever placed in that public art program. Each sculpture was designed using 3-D modeling software.

In the 2010s, Alice Aycock started her Turbulence Series. These are swirling metal sculptures that look like twisters, highway systems, DNA strands, or even dancers. Works from this series have been shown in New York and Kansas. One piece, Twister Grande (tall) (2020), is now on permanent display at the Ulrich Museum of Art. In 2021, one of her works was placed in front of Des Moines International Airport.

Collections and Exhibitions

Alice Aycock's art has been shown in many important exhibitions. Her work was part of the 1971 exhibition Twenty Six Contemporary Women Artists at The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum. It was also included in the 1979 Whitney Biennial. She has created special installations at the Museum of Modern Art (1977).

She has had two big shows looking back at her work. One covered her art from 1972 to 1983 and was organized in Germany. The other, called "Complex Visions," was put together by the Storm King Art Center. In 2013, a show of her drawings, Alice Aycock Drawings: Some Stories Are Worth Repeating, opened at the new Parrish Art Museum in New York.

Alice Aycock’s artworks can be found in the collections of major museums like the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), the Brooklyn Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and the National Gallery.

Her public sculptures can be seen all over the United States. These include a permanent hanging sculpture at the Dulles International Airport (finished in 2012), her Star Sifter project for Terminal 1 at John F. Kennedy International Airport, a piece at the San Francisco Public Library, and an outdoor sculpture at the Western Washington University Public Sculpture Collection. Other notable works include Strange Attractor at the Kansas City International Airport, Ghost Ballet for the East Bank Machineworks in Nashville, Tennessee, and a floating sculpture for Broward County, Florida. From March to July 2014, her series of seven sculptures called Park Avenue Paper Chase were displayed on the Park Avenue Malls in New York City.

See also

In Spanish: Alice Aycock para niños