I try to just let it happen.”
Ruth Duckworth
Ruth Duckworth (1919–2009)
10.22.09
"Modernist sculptor Ruth Duckworth has passed away, according to the Chicago Tribune. A Chicagoan since 1964 via Germany and England, Duckworth created work that resides in the collections of major museums, including the Art Institute of Chicago. Many of her large-scale murals and sculptures grace lobbies, airport terminals, and other public spaces. Shortly after coming to the US to teach at the University of Chicago in the 1960s, she created a four-hundred-square-foot stoneware mural that forms the entryway of the school’s geophysical sciences building. In the 1970s, she received a commission for Clouds over Lake Michigan, which was first in a bank and later in the lobby of the Chicago Board of Trade Building, a sweeping piece of relief that incorporates meteorologic and geologic themes. Amid a 2005 career retrospective of her work that had showings in New York and at the Chicago Cultural Center, Duckworth told the Tribune that when she made something, “I try not to think. I try to just let it happen.”
c/o Artforum here
