RALEIGH, NC.- The North Carolina Museum of Art will add to its outdoor art collection, installing five new works in the fall of 2018 and continuing through the spring of 2019. The works include site-specific temporary and permanent installations, as well as three works on long-term loan from the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C.

Hirshhorn Sculpture Loans (now on view)
· Lunar Bird by Joan Miró, 1945, Wheeler Courtyard, West Building
· Three Red Lines by George Rickey, 1966, The Plaza
· Untitled by Ellsworth Kelly, 1986, South Lawn, West Building

Three monumental sculptures by masters of 20th-century art—Joan Miró, George Rickey, and Ellsworth Kelly—arrived in August on long-term loan from the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C. Installed in various sites around West Building, including the entrance Plaza, front lawn, and North Garden, these works animate the NCMA landscape with a diverse array of artistic expression.

Lunar Bird by Joan Miró resembles ancient votive sculptures and reflects his interest in the cosmos, with its crescent moon–shaped face and arms reaching toward the sky. A figure in the early-20th-century surrealist art movement, Miró saw art as a way for the subconscious mind to express itself. The abstract sculpture Untitled, part of Ellsworth Kelly’s “rocker” series, was conceived when the artist took a plastic coffee lid from his local deli, cut out a flat section, folded it in half, and rocked it back and forth on a table. The sculpture plays with depth and dimension, as the rounded edge of the ellipse contrasts with the extreme flatness of the sculpture’s surface. Finally, Rickey’s Three Red Lines is a kinetic sculpture composed of three pointed arms that gracefully move in an arc. He utilized ball bearings, pendulums, counter-weights, and pivot points to predetermine the path that the arms of the sculpture take.

Daniel Johnston Sculpture Commission
(installation scheduled for October 2018)
From late October through November, North Carolina native and artist Daniel Johnston, who lives and works in Seagrove, will install his first monumental, outdoor museum commission in the Park‘s meadow near Mark di Suvero’s No Fuss. Johnston’s installation consists of 200 ceramic pillars that create a 350-foot-long open wall, cutting through the elevation changes of the landscape. Ranging in height from several inches to six feet, the pinnacle of each pillar reaches exactly the same elevation, forming a perfectly level line that highlights the dips and rises of the rolling hillside. This determined line of columns, marching across the meadow, reveals questions of walls, borders, and boundaries, and how we move through the world, both literally and metaphorically. The ceramic pillars, hand-built by the artist and his apprentices, are made of locally mined Piedmont clay and fired in a wood kiln. Johnston started out his career in pottery in North Carolina as an apprentice to Mark Hewitt before working with potters in Thailand and England. Pushing the conventional boundaries of craft and pottery, Johnston has expanded his practice into large-scale installations that transform familiar forms into unexpected and awe-inspiring experiences for the viewer.

Heather Hart Park Art Project
(installation scheduled for spring 2019)
A new series of annual, temporary art projects in the Park is guest curated by Teka Selman and opens with Heather Hart’s Oracular Rooftop in spring 2019, on view through the summer. The Brooklyn-based artist creates outdoor spaces that invite viewer participation and engagement. Her series Oracular Rooftops is an ongoing project of interactive sculptures sited in landscapes so that they appear to be houses half-submerged in the earth. As described by Hart, each work is “an independent rooftop, removed from its house, and dropped from the sky to live its own life in a new context. A rooftop can refer to home, stability, or shelter, but in this context, it is also an action of reclaiming power—of influence, direction, and earth.”

Each Oracular Rooftop serves as a gathering space brought to life by community interaction. Hart will collaborate with local artists and others to activate the Rooftop with a series of public programs and performances. The sculpture is intentionally open, welcoming visitors to climb on and explore the roof’s exterior, while the interior is a space for thoughtful engagement, conversations, and interactions. Previous versions of the Oracular Rooftops have been presented at locations such as Storm King Art Center, the Seattle Art Museum, and the Brooklyn Museum.