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| Press Release (pdf:20k) Artist Bio Sponsorship Location
stainless
steel pole and September
14 - October 18, 2004 Rockefeller
Center
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Jonathan Borofsky's Walking to the Sky is his first-ever major outdoor
work in New York City. Walking to the Sky depicts a number of
different people scaling a soaring 100-foot-tall stainless steel pole.
The piece sprouts out of the ground like a contemporary counterpart to
Jack's fairytale beanstalk. The stainless steel pole tilts at an impossibly
steep 75 degree angle, but several figures have undertaken the climb,
striding purposefully upward, among them a little girl with pigtails,
a businesswoman, a young man in a t-shirt, and several others. Three
people stand at the bottom, looking up. The work is inspired by a story
that Borofsky's father used to tell him when he was a child about a friendly
giant who lived in the sky. In each tale, father and son would travel
up to the sky to talk to the giant about what needed to be done for everyone
back on earth. The sculpture is, the artist says, a "celebration
of the human potential for discovering who we are and where we need to
go." Jonathan Borofsky's large-scale sculptures--which include permanent outdoor
commissions in Berlin, Minneapolis, Baltimore, and other cities around
the world--depict the human form in simple, universally appealing ways.
Walking to the Sky has two direct predecessors: Man Walking to the Sky,
shown at Documenta IX in Kassel, Germany in 1992, and Woman Walking to the Sky, which Borofsky made for Strasbourg, France two years later. For
this exhibition at Rockefeller Center, Borofksy has transformed these
solo figures into a multitude. "It is all of humanity rising upwards
from the earth to the heavens above-striving into the future with strength
and determination…" Artist Bio Sponsorship About Tishman Speyer Properties Location
Other Public Art Fund projects at Rockefeller Center
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