The current installation of Calder’s Tripes, on long-term loan from the Calder Foundation, represents the latest phase in the University’s efforts to integrate public art into its historic grounds. The tree-like sculpture piques the imagination with its biomorphic shape that appears to change as viewers move around it. The sculpture is made of painted sheet metal, and when the sun passes overhead, its “arms” appear to crawl across the ground in shadow form. It seems quite at home in a landscape full of iconic imagery, secret symbols and quotes about the power of knowledge. At its dedication last spring, Tripes was celebrated as representing the University’s founding principles of “innovation, invention and freedom of thought.”

Calder was born in Philadelphia in 1898, into an artistic family. His grandfather and father were sculptors, and his mother was a painter. Yet his initial inclination was more technical, and he earned a degree in mechanical engineering; he studied, among other things, the ways in which free-moving bodies react to applied force. It was not until 1923 that Calder seriously began exploring his artistic talents, painting in New York and, a few years later, exploring sculpting in Paris. By 1930, he was producing mobiles—abstract sculptures featuring free-moving hanging shapes. He also attracted attention for his grand abstract sculptures, which combine the stability of solid sculpture and the kinetic freedom of a mobile—a form he cleverly named the “stabile.”

When his stabile Steel Fish arrived on the UVA grounds on January 4, 1950, it received a less-than-warm reception. The sculpture was one of 28 mostly abstract works by various artists in a temporary exhibition, “Calder and Sculpture Today,” assembled by the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond. Fifteen feet high, Steel Fish was the largest of the works and, as a recent acquisition of the VMFA, garnered the most attention. Displayed in front of the Rotunda, whereas the other artworks were presented inside, Steel Fish was composed of red, yellow, black and silver-colored steel plates, balls, wires and pipes, all dangling from moving limbs.