This past week, I went on my third tour of Donald Judd’s studio and home in Soho, 101 Spring Street. (The only way you can see the space is by tour). I love this “house,” which is an old textile factory from the late 1800s. The light cascading through the old thick panes of glass seems as if you are wrapped in the sun’s rays. You can see shadows at play and the century plus wood soaks up the sun generously. I love the space for its simplicity. Judd was the artist of the simple line. Find the right angle. But, Judd was also an avid art collector and writer. And on the  fourth floor, as you enter his bedroom that is adorned with a major installation by his best friend, Dan Flavin and a weighty sculpture by John Chamberlin. You are often distracted by their size. But, just before. Resting on a loft space was a drawing of Mickey Mouse. Mickey, our American hero staring down at me. It was surprising. I had not seen it before in my visits, probably pulled too quickly to the floating and dream-like bedroom of Judd and his ballerina wife. The drawing was by Claes Oldenburg. Oldenburg would die three days later at 93 years old. 

I had never thought about Oldenburg’s drawings, nor had I ever seen one in person. All artists draw, doodle, or take note at some point, pencil to paper. I remarked to the Spring Street Studio guide that I think I usually like artist’s drawings more because it shows me their process along the way. She agreed quickly. It shows me that they make mistakes along the way to the great masterpieces. The artist line takes work.

 Three days later, the internet was flooded with Oldenburg memories, reflections, and odes. In my own personal reflection, this Swedish artist has had a surprising impact on my life and the places I have one time or the other called home. I have to be honest, I was never a direct fan of his (and now I find out his wife Coosje played a dominate roll in his creations as well - the wife left behind once again). I wasn’t in love with the work. I was kidding myself if I said I didn’t love seeing an oversized cheeseburger in an art museum. The work is cheeky, kitsch, high pop art, easily insta-grammable. But, I was never in love. And maybe I didn’t need to be in love with it, but there was something more in my reflection of his work.

I spent my early arts career mapping public art in Saint Louis learning about monuments to white straight men who served in the civil war or the Missouri state senate. As I was recording each name, date, material, provenance, and geo-tag of monuments that probably need more than “context” to justify their existence. Nonetheless, I came across Saint Louis’ Art Museum Giant Three-Way Plug, Scale A, 1971. I had grown up wondering about this plug and wondering if it actually worked. Where is the outlet to support this larger-than-life plug? Oh, Gregory. I really wanted a giant house to plug in a giant lamp. I thought to myself, it had to work, why else would we build this? I was an advocate for form and function early on.

 From Saint Louis, I arrived in San Francisco, California as a 22-year old Midwesterner with big dreams. And of course, Oldenburg met my dreams with  Cupid’s Span (2002, Gap, Inc.) This bow over the years changed meaning multiple times along the Embarcadero, nestled comfortably against the waters of San Francisco Bay. The change in meaning was particularly evident when The Bay Lights went live in 2013. I thought the largest light sculpture in the world and the largest bow were somehow playing with each other, that the arrow might get stuck in between the nodes of lights dancing on the bridge. 

And most recently, my time in Kansas City, often escaping writer’s block in the Nelson-Atkins, the shuttle cocks greeted me. The shuttle cocks of the Nelson-Atkins Museum in Kansas City  (commissioned in 1994) are possibly one of his most iconic works because of local admiration. They are iconic in Kansas City, thought not beloved right away. Icons take a while. I recently read about the thinking behind the shuttlecocks. The artists thought of the Beaux arts museum as the badminton net, the space in between. It made more sense that he was using the entire landscape as something to play with and manipulate. A backyard game of my childhood built to grand size. I often had the same thought as I did with the plug. I imagined the 5,500 pound shuttlecocks flying across the sky. How wonderful that could be? Just the mere thought is wonderful.

These giants in my homes were backdrops and reminders to keep dreaming big. They always stopped me in my tracks even if I didn’t like them that much, they stopped me. Like giants, they are imposing, but not always mean. Even a small grimmacing Mickey Mouse in New York is quickly becoming an icon for me, the biggest dream might have the smallest icon. Sometimes, giants are friendly, even funny. And I think Oldenburg knew the power of a good joke. A joke that might be going on for much longer than even my life. He played an iconic joke on all of us, and for this, he won me over. And as Adam Gopnik so wonderfully wrote in his Postscript in The New Yorker, “Still, that his monuments got made at all was a triumph of the American capacity for belief.” And just maybe, we do have a capacity to laugh at ourselves. Thank you Claes. 

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