History of Flight

Flights of Fancy

The inspiration for this work came from a magazine pictorial about a sculpture of organ pipes in a Swedish forest. When the wind blew, a sound resonated in the pipes. The grey strips in the piece are representative of these organ pipes and are used as a backdrop to hold pictures of Da Vinci and early explorers and aviators. The repetition of Wright Brothers flight pictures at the right and a model of the first airplane below the symbolic pipes show man’s use of the air to leave the earth.

Travel Light But Travel Wright

The Wright brothers, Orville (August 19, 1871 – January 30, 1948) and Wilbur (April 16, 1867 – May 30, 1912), were American inventors and aviation pioneers who invented and built the world’s first successful airplane and made the first controlled, powered and sustained heavier-than-air human flight at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, on December 17, 1903. In this construction, a repetitive picture of colored clouds is used to cover the box. A model of the early Wright brothers’ airplane from the artist’s childhood, bird pictures, a photograph of the first flight and Michaelangelo’s Hand of God are assembled inside the box.