Untitled, 1976 - Richard Stankiewicz

Walking into the sheltered space of the Podium East Garden lined with bushes behind the Performing Arts Center, we encounter nestled within a grove of trees a robust, rusty steel cylinder seeming to whimsically teeter above its cubic base on a massive metal branch. [fig. 1] This is the untitled work of Richard Stankiewicz, a sculptor known for his early welded works made from found scrap-iron, who later fabricated monumental pieces like this one. This artist’s work has been exhibited throughout the world including at the Museum of Modern Art and Guggenheim Museum in New York, and at the opening of the Georges Pompidou Center, Paris.   Stankiewicz was also a professor of art here at the University at Albany from 1967 to 1981, and Professor Emeritus in 1982, a year before his death. In 1979 University Art Gallery director Nancy Hyatt Liddle [fig. 2]—namesake of the Nancy Hyatt Liddle Gallery on the second floor of our present-day University Art Museum—organized a retrospective of his work that also toured to the Museum of Fine Arts, Springfield, Massachusetts; Cornell University; and the Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, MA, and was  reviewed for the New York Times by noted critic Hilton Kramer.  

Stankiewicz, born in 1922, Philadelphia to a Polish family, was a US Navy veteran of World War II who had been inspired by the art he saw in museums in cities where he had shore leave. The GI Bill allowed him to begin studying painting in 1948 with the famed Abstract Expressionist Hans Hofmann 

[http://www.hanshofmann.org/about] at his New York school. Subsequently, Stankiewicz studied with other modern artists in Paris. These included Fernand Léger  

[https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/leger/hd_leger.htm] 1950 whose abstracted the human body into a series of machine-like cylinders in his paintings; and the Belarus-born French sculptor Ossip Zadkine [https://thejohnsoncollection.org/ossip-zadkine/] 1950-51, a teacher of penetrating insight whose figurative work employed the flat geometric planes made popular by Cubist painting and sculpture, such as that by Picasso, and an architectonic structure that immediately influenced Stankiewicz’s work.  

[spoken only] To learn more about the artists who taught Stankiewicz, tap their names in the transcript. 

Stankiewicz returning to the United States in 1951. As he started to clear out his yard to make a garden, he excavated a number of rusty metal objects. Like the artists of the earlier 20th century modern art movements Cubism [https://www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/c/cubism] and Dada 

[https://www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/d/dada] who often collaged or welded objects from everyday life into their artwork, Stankiewicz began welding together the objects he found to make sculptures. 

Cylindrical forms in particular—cans, kettles, water tanks, pipes—often became the central forms in his work. The University Art Museum has one such work in its collection from 1964. [spoken only] To learn more about Cubism or Dada, tap those words in the transcript. 

The untitled 1976 outdoor sculpture we’re looking at here still incorporates the cylinder, but no longer uses identifiable objects of his 1950s and 1960s scrap metal work. Instead, inspired by his 1969 visit to an Australian foundry, Stankiewicz emphasized pure geometry and industrial forms, and used milled steel in his late works.

Take a walk around the sculpture to see how our relationship to it changes from different vantage points. Facing northeast, with the Earth Sciences & Mathematics building in the background, the massive cylinder looms dangerously over us ready to topple on us. But walking around to either side we encounter something more playful and see it springing upward, launching itself off its base and defying our expectation that a steel sculpture should appear heavy.  Continuing fully to the other side, we see its most humorous form, like a devouring Pac-Man mouth.  

Step closer to get a better look at the materials. The artist has not painted the steel or tried to mask it in anyway.

Although the geometry of the sculpture is in stark contrast to the organic growth of the Podium East Garden, the coarse, earthy texture of the weathered brown steel and orange rust drips show it has become integrated in to the garden’s ecology.  

Depending what time of year you view Stankiewicz’s sculpture, you’ll see it play a different visual role within the Podium East Garden.  When the azaleas are in bloom—and especially when their spring blossoms blanket the garden in pinks and purples—the understated rusty sculpture hides away, surprising the viewer who stumbles across it. But it braves the winter and appears to perpetually spring into motion when all else has died.   First exhibited the year after its creation at an outdoor solo exhibition at Dag Hammerskjold Plaza, New York, this sculpture takes on a new life in every new context. Looking beyond the garden, the sculpture enters in a teasing banter with the architecture. The humor of its tilt and its stocky form is even more pronounced among the tall elegant lines of the podium piers, branching into the ceiling vaults, and contrasts with the rectangular housing towers in the distance.