Video: Dartmouth Installs Sculpture by Ursula von Rydingsvard

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Curator Jessica Hong talks about Wide Babelki Bowl, newly installed on campus.

Ursula von Rydingsvard’s renowned wooden sculptures are “at once constructed and organic, monumental and humble, formal and expressive,” writes the Hood Museum of Art about Dartmouth’s newest piece of public art, von Rydingsvard’s Wide Babelki Bowl. The cedar sculpture is installed on campus outside Rollins Chapel.

“It’s a quiet, unassuming work, but the more time you spend with it, the more its power comes out,” says John Stomberg, the Virginia Rice Kelsey 1961s Director of the Hood, of the new installation. “It’s part of an organic world. That’s the visual discussion that it encourages—the dynamism between the organic, suggested by its soft forms, and the geometric or the rational, suggested by the fact that it’s made with four-by-four planks of cedar, so that when you step back, it’s on a grid. So you have the grid pushing against the irrational.”

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The sculpture being installed in its permanent place on campus.
The sculpture being installed in its permanent place on campus. (Photo by Eli Burakian ’00)
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