Arnaldo Pomodoro, whose bronze spheres decorate prominent public spaces around the world, dies at 98
Arnaldo Pomodoro, one of Italy 's most prominent contemporary artists whose bronze spheres decorate iconic public spaces from the Vatican to the United Nations, has died at age 98, his foundation said Monday.
Pomodoro died at home in Milan on Sunday, the eve of his 99th birthday, according to a statement from Carlotta Montebello, director general of the Arnaldo Pomodoro Foundation.
Pomodoro's spheres are instantly recognizable: shiny, smooth bronze globes with clawed out interiors that Pomodoro has said referred to the superficial perfection of exteriors and the troubled complexity of interiors.
The Vatican's sphere, which occupies a prominent place in the Pigna Courtyard of the Vatican Museums, features an internal mechanism that rotates with the wind. 'In my work I see the cracks, the eroded parts, the destructive potential that emerges from our time of disillusionment,' the Vatican quoted Pomodoro as saying about its sphere.
The United Nations in New York received a 3.3-meter diameter 'Sphere Within Sphere' sculpture as a gift from Italy in 1996. The U.N. sphere has both humanistic and technology-oriented meaning and referenced the coming of the new millennium: 'a smooth exterior womb erupted by complex interior forms,' and 'a promise for the rebirth of a less troubled and destructive world,' Pomodoro said of it.
Other spheres are located at museums around the world and outside the Italian foreign ministry, which has the original work that Pomodoro made in 1966 for the Montreal Expo that began his monumental sculpture project.
Pomodoro was born in Montefeltro, Italy, on June 23, 1926. In addition to his spheres, he designed theatrical sets, land projects and machines. He had multiple retrospectives and taught at Stanford University, University of California at Berkeley and Mills College, according to his biography on the foundation website.
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The Guardian
14 hours ago
- The Guardian
The ongoing fight to replace racist monuments in the US: ‘requires a lot of perseverance'
After nearly half a decade, Vinnie Bagwell, a self-taught sculptor-artist, is still waiting for the million dollars that the New York City department of cultural affairs promised for her to work on monument Victory Beyond Sims, after winning the artist competition to replace the monument of Dr J Marion Sims in 2020. 'It just requires a lot of diligence and perseverance,' she said to the Guardian. 'A lot of times, people don't realize how important and impactful art in public places is until they see it.' Sims was a 19th-century gynecologist known for experimenting on 12 enslaved and poor immigrant women without consent. City officials removed his monument in April 2018 after a unanimous vote by the Public Design Commission. Bagwell will be the first Black woman to have a memorial on Fifth Avenue. Bagwell began sculpting in 1993 and created the First Lady of Jazz in Yonkers, the first public artwork made by a contemporary African American woman commissioned by a municipality in the United States. Her 9ft (2.7-meter) monument is of a Black woman with 14ft wings, only the second Black Angel statue to be visible publicly in the US. The shape of Africa cut away from the woman's heart symbolizes the enslavement of 12 million people over hundreds of years. On her right side the braille will read 'My Soul looks back and wonders how I got over!' and on the left it will read 'Primum non nocere!' (First do no harm). To honor the suffering of Sims's victims, whose anguish brought advancement to the field of gynecology, there will be 12 women silhouetted on her back. A slave ship is also depicted on the back to illustrate the inhumanity of slavery. The names of the survivors we know will be emblazoned into the helm of the garment. Bagwell hopes that the monument, which will be across the street from the New York Academy of Medicine, will function as a vehicle of change for the community. 'Women are more under fire now than we were before. So many of us women have lost a lot of the right to control our bodies. New York is still safe, but [women in] Arkansas aren't,' she says. 'When you look at some of the things that this particular administration is talking about, they're talking about going backward; that is still something to be concerned about.' Bagwell's situation is not unique, with many other cities also stalling progress to replace Confederate statues and symbols. However, Vinnie has encountered many obstacles. First, a committee chose artist Simone Leigh as the winner, even though community members had voted for Bagwell. After a heated debate, the city ultimately reversed its decision. Then, the city attempted to cut $250,000 from its budget but failed. Bagwell has been waiting longer than the typical 90 days after signing her contract to receive the money. In a statement to the Guardian, the department stated its excitement about the project moving forward. 'New York City has taken bold steps in the effort to foster a collection of public artworks that better reflect who we are as a city, including this project – long called for by the local community – to commission a new monument for this site in East Harlem,' they note. 'This administration remains committed to fostering a diverse, vibrant public art collection that more fully represents the vast range of stories, experiences, and backgrounds that define New Yorkers. We're excited for the Victory project to move ahead.' On 23 June, the design commission voted unanimously to approve Bagwell's designs, and she can now begin work. Bagwell's situation reflects a broader failure to follow through on legislation and promises made following the 2020 racial justice protests, where Americans dismantled statues of Confederate soldiers that stood in their communities after the killing of George Floyd, an unarmed Black man. In 2021, Joe Biden passed legislation to replace the monument of Roger Taney, a pro-slavery chief justice who served on the court from 1836 until 1864, with one of Thurgood Marshall, the first African American supreme court justice, in the United States Capitol. The intended deadline for the building of the statute was December 2024, but that month, a source familiar with the matter said the joint committee on the library had only just signed off on a memorandum to begin the process. Now, a 2025 executive order signed by Donald Trump mandating that the secretary of the interior restore monuments removed in the last five years puts in jeopardy the already fragile progress made by past laws to diversify the public landscape in the US. Jamaican sculptor Basil Watson said that it's 'very possible' that more people are now in support of removing objects that help tell Black stories. 'It's the risk we take that is part of the struggle,' he said. Watson worked to replace a Confederate monument with a John Lewis memorial in Decatur, Georgia. 'It would be a tragedy if it were to be removed, but then we'll just have to do it again,' he said. 'The journey cannot be stopped.' In 2017, Trump tweeted: 'the beauty [Confederate monuments] that is being taken out of our cities, towns and parks will be greatly missed and never able to be comparably replaced!' This debate on the rise and fall of monuments dates back to the 1870s. In 1876, Frederick Douglass called into question the making of the Emancipation Memorial, built by artist Thomas Bell in Washington DC. The creation of the statute was funded using donations from recently freed people. While the city created the monument to honor emancipation, it depicted a white man holding out his hand over a chained kneeling Black man, a design Douglass found problematic. 'What I want to see before I die is a monument representing the Negro, not couched on his knees like a four-footed animal, but erect on his feet like a man,' he said. DC officials removed the statute in 2021, and advocates are still discussing its replacement. Nearly 150 years after Douglass's speech, only 10% of the top 50 national monuments are of Black and Indigenous people, according to an audit completed by the Monument Lab, a non-profit public art and history studio. 'The story of this continent is not reflected in our monument landscape in full,' said Paul Farber, the director and co-founder of the Monument Lab. 'The monuments we have tell a partial story. Adding a monument or the selective removal of a monument can have a profound effect for a city or town. If we don't respond to the erasures, the lies by design we will be doomed to repeat. Our audit also showed that 99.4% of monuments were not taken down in 2021 or 2022.' The Trump administration's influence has now rolled back even that little bit of progress. This year, Pete Hegseth rolled back the names of two military forts to their namesakes of confederate soldiers. Following pressure from Republicans, Washington DC's mayor, Muriel Bowser, also ordered the destruction of the Black Lives Matter plaza in front of the White House. Trump has proposed reviving his controversial National Garden of American Heroes, using money cut from the National Endowment for the Humanities, which ended hundreds of grants for libraries, museums and archives. The garden would include George Washington and Christopher Columbus statues alongside Martin Luther King Jr, Kobe Bryant and Whitney Houston. 'When you look at some of the things that this particular administration is talking about, they're talking about going backward,' Bagwell says. 'That is still something to be concerned about.' Nationally, Republicans have been mixed on the issue of inclusion in public spaces. A Kentucky state senator, Chris McDaniel, is still advocating for the replacement of a Confederate statue. In 2020, he pre-filed a bill that would replace Jefferson Davis in the Capitol Rotunda with Carl Brashear, the first African American US navy master diver born in Tonieville, Kentucky. 'His story is inspirational,' he says. 'That's what monuments are supposed to be about. It's supposed to be able to point to people and say: 'This is somebody you can look up to.'' McDaniel's bill to replace Davis in the Capitol is at a standstill as the Kentucky Capitol Arts Advisory Committee and other legislators must weigh in on who they believe deserves to be honored. Mississippi's Republican governor, Tate Reeves, has shown mixed messages about Confederate symbols in his state. During the 2020 election, almost 73% of people in Mississippi voted to remove the Confederate flag with a new state's flag. 'This is not a political moment to me but a solemn occasion to lead our Mississippi family to come together, to be reconciled and to move on,' Reeves said after the vote and before it was eventually replaced. In the same year, Reeves simultaneously opposed the removal of Confederate monuments. 'I reject the mobs tearing down statues of our history, north and south, Union and Confederate, founding fathers and veterans,' he says. 'I reject the chaos and lawlessness, and I am proud it has not happened in our state.' Bryan Stevenson, the founder of the Equal Justice Initiative who led the building of Legacy Sites in Montgomery, Alabama, a civil rights museum that works to reshape the racist narratives about African Americans in Alabama, explains Reeves's messaging. 'I think it's a struggle, a competing narrative, and sometimes they give away a little something by holding on to something that makes what they're giving away feel acceptable,' he tells the Guardian. Stevenson says it 'is about power, because most of the people who are kind of in control of these things [are] aligned, in my view, with this problematic history. We can't accept just what [they're] gonna give' us. Some artists who have worked to replace Confederate monuments with ones that honor Black history have succeeded and received praise despite government resistance. In Roanoke, Virginia, the city sculptor commissioned Lawrence Bechtel to replace a statue of Confederate general Robert E Lee with one of Henrietta Lacks. Lacks' cells, now called HeLa, were taken without her knowledge in 1951 and have now become vital to medical research; they have been used to develop polio and Covid-19 vaccines. It took about four years for the city to raise the money for the statue and a year from the contract being signed for Bechtel to build the monument. 'I had bought a veil to cover it over, and everyone was invited to come close as the veil was pulled off, and people just mobbed it. It was fantastic,' he says. 'It was just wonderful. It was very uplifting.' Bechtel said he has yet to receive a negative email. Watson, who built a monument of John Lewis to replace a memorial put in place by the United Daughters of the Confederacy, recalls the community's excitement about the monument before he even finished. 'The idea of putting up John Lewis in its place was quite exciting for the community, and since it has been up, I have had nothing but positive responses,' he says. Watson remains steadfast in his belief that the inclusivity of public art is crucial. 'I think we artists need to represent our community; we need to have our values represented in our environment,' he says. 'I think it's important that we do have art in our community that represents the truth, represents our values, represents our history, and points our way forward.' Stevenson, a civil rights lawyer, believes that reclaiming the narrative in public spaces can challenge the racist narratives embedded into some Americans' mindset. When he first started working in public art, there were 59 markers and monuments honoring the Confederacy in his state yet none paid tribute to Alabama's history of being the state with one of the largest slave populations, so he and his team worked to create plaques in public spaces that honored those who were enslaved. He refers to the process of reframing public conversation as narrative work, responding to the racist views long perpetuated by institutions. With the building and taking down of monuments, he suggests that we need a new framework to tell the full story of American history as a nation. 'I think we have to find a better way to help people in this country recognize that there's a place for people of African descent in this country and that our stories can't be denied any longer,' Stevenson says. Bagwell also emphasizes the importance of honoring African Americans' vital contributions to American society through public art. 'It's just stunning that we have made so much out of so little,' she says. 'The contributions we've made to this country are phenomenal, and they should be remembered because we are very much a part of what made America great in the first place.'
BBC News
a day ago
- BBC News
The artist who swept Glasgow's streets for 30 years
When Allan Richardson was 17 he wanted to go to art school, but one day he returned home from school to find his dad had secured him an interview for a job with the council."All I wanted to do was my art," said Allan. "But my dad said to me, 'you can do your art but you have to have something to keep you'."Allan went to the interview and the following Monday he started work as a "litter boy", going round the streets and emptying the took a back seat over the next decade as he worked in various council jobs before settling on sweeping the streets of Glasgow's west end. For 30 years, until his recent retirement, Allan kept the city's Byres Road and its surrounding streets clean but he also made sure he had his paint palette and sketchbook in his pocket. Drawing and painting almost every day during his lunch break, and often with his handmade sketchbook balanced on the bar of his cart, Allan quickly became accustomed to searching for the west end's hidden gems."People walk by going to work or university, or they're on a phone and they're just walking ahead thinking about where they need to be, but there is so much all around them."That was the good thing about my job, I would see all of that and think 'that's an interesting feature on that building, I might come back and draw that'." Allan, who is now 60, said the area had changed a lot over the three decades he cleaned and painted said Byres Road has always been a centre for students, but the butchers and jewellery stores of the past have now been swapped for chain takeaways and coffee a plan in his head as he swept the streets, Allan has painted hundreds of buildings in the west end from the cobbled backstreets and popular student hangouts to the Kibble Palace in the Botanic Gardens and the iconic tower of Glasgow University's Gilbert Scott Building."There's a lot of good architecture in the west end and there's a lot of history, which I really like," he said. Part of Glasgow west end's story Allan said one of the reasons he stayed in his job so long was the people he met and spoke to each day."For some of the older people in the area, chatting to me would make their day as they maybe wouldn't speak to anyone for a couple of days," he of the people Allan spoke to and became a close friend of was renowned Scottish writer and artist Alasdair Gray."I used to sweep his street," said said he had no idea who Gray was but the paintbrushes in his window had caught his attention as he passed by, so the next time Allan saw him, he asked if he was an artist."He invited me in to have a look around at his work but he never introduced himself," Allan said."It wasn't until later I discovered who he was, and I would chat to him like with any of the other locals."One day Gray asked Allan if he could draw him."I went to his flat and he sketched me," he said."A few years later, I discovered I was going to be on the new mural at Hillhead subway station after its refurbishment, which was fantastic."I can now go to the underground and see myself standing there with my brush as part of the story of the west end." Gray, who is best-known for his first novel Lanark, died in 2019. His Hillhead subway mural shows a panoramic and detailed sweep of the west end, from Byres Road looking east towards the centre of shows many of the streets Allan swept and drew for 30 years. Now retired, Allan said it's time to move on and learn something new as he hopes to do more art classes and explore new places in the city with his Glasgow Urban Sketchers group.
Telegraph
2 days ago
- Telegraph
‘This could pass as homemade': The best and worst supermarket lemon sorbet
Cold, refreshing lemon sorbet; tangy and citric, with a depth of fruitiness. We may have (thank goodness) given up on serving scoops 'to cleanse the palate' between the fish and the meat course, but it's still an excellent way to end a meal. Or top it with a splash of vodka and a glass of prosecco to make a sgroppino, an Italian dessert-cum-after-dinner-cocktail. The high street offers many options, from supermarket own-label tubs to specialist producers. In my blind taste test of nine, I looked for a real fruit juice flavour, rather than the overwhelming taste of lemon flavouring. Lemon zest and oil have a place in sorbet, but not at the expense of juice. As for that important acid note, I want it to be nuanced and natural, not the sour slap of citric acid which has nothing to do with citrus fruit, as it is produced industrially by fermenting sugar. Skip to: I also scrutinised the ingredients lists, keeping an eye out for additions that manufacturers may use to improve the texture and slow the melt (more on which below) – after all, they have to produce a sorbet that will survive a journey home, perhaps an hour in a hot car, before being returned to the freezer. Effectively, it's partially defrosting and refreezing, which is disastrous for the texture of a homemade, all-natural sorbet. Some of those made with industrial emulsifiers (which give sorbet a spumy, or foamy, texture, melting to a froth rather than a syrup) did, in fact, taste good – but the best-flavoured one contained none at all. Which, in my books, is pretty cool indeed. How I tasted Each lemon sorbet was scooped into a glass while I was out of the room. The glasses were assigned a letter to anonymise them. I returned and tasted, making notes on flavour and texture. Once the identity of each had been revealed, I compared their ingredients lists and the weight-to-volume ratio.
