-Offers a unique insight into the complexities of public art competitions in America, featuring proposals from a world-renowned sculptor -Doubles as a study on some of Athena Tacha's most groundbreaking and innovative work Visualizing the Universe offers a unique insight into the complexities of public art competitions in America by focusing on one of its pioneers, Athena Tacha. The book provides a complete record of her proposals for permanent public sculpture from 1972 to 2012 - all of the texts she submitted for 139 competitions in which she was a finalist - with illustrations of every work. The book pays special attention to projects that have been developed since 2000, which include some of Tacha's most ambitious work, notably her multiple sculptures at Wisconsin Place in Washington, D.C. and the Muhammad Ali Center in Louisville. As Glenn Harper, editor of Sculpture magazine, notes in the Introduction (co-authored with Twylene Moyer): "This book is a testament to a lifetime's worth of projects devoted to creating... public sculptural environments that translate the forms and forces of nature into abstract playgrounds for the human body and mind. ... Inspired by geometric growth and generative patterning on both micro and macro levels, they reinterpret the various concerns of earthwork and Minimalism, abstraction, place-making and social interaction through a cosmic lens that sees human beings and our efforts as part of a larger system." Contents: Introduction by Glenn Harper and Twylene Moyer; Early Proposals: 1972-80, Projects 1-25; Prodigious Activity: 1981-91, Projects 25-102; An Easing Pace: 1992-98, Projects 103-121; Major Commissions: 2000-2012, Projects 122-139
About the Author: Born in Greece in 1936, Athena Tacha, Professor Emerita of Sculpture at Oberlin College and Adjunct Professor at the University of Maryland, College Park, received an MFA in sculpture from the Academy of Fine Arts, Athens, an M.A. in art history from Oberlin College, and a Ph.D. in aesthetics from the Sorbonne, Paris. She is author of books on Rodin and Brancusi. In addition to her pioneering career in public sculpture, Tacha has made photographic and text-based conceptual art, and "body sculptures" with natural materials. Her work, exhibited throughout the U.S. and Europe, is in many museum collections and been shown in retrospectives at the High Museum, Atlanta, Grounds for Sculpture, a traveling exhibition in Greece, and one-artist shows in the Zabriski, Huntchinson, and Kouros galleries in New York. Since 2001 she has been represented by the Marsha Mateyka Gallery in Washington, D.C. Edited by Richard E. Spear, Professor Emeritus of Art History and former director of the Allen Memorial Art Museum at Oberlin College.He has written extensively on Caravaggio, Domenichino, Guido Reni and the economic lives of painters in 17th-century Rome. He is a past Editor-in-Chief of The Art Bulletin and been awarded fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, National Endowment for the Humanities, Center for Advance Study in the Visual Arts, National Humanities Center, and the Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundations. Spear is an Affiliate Research Professor at the University of Maryland, College Park. Introduction by Glenn Harper and Twylene Moyer, both of Sculpture Magazine.