Pocket Guide -> Media -> White oak, tall grass prairie plants, steel, industrial patina, sheetrock, and paint -> Spirit
Spirit
by Mel Chin · American, born 1951
| Creation Date: | 1994 |
| Media & Support: | White oak, tall grass prairie plants, steel, industrial patina, sheetrock, and paint |
| Dimensions: | 144 x 240 x 600 inches |
| Credit: | Museum Purchase. Howald Fund |
This much loved work is not on view because it requires a site-specific gallery space not currently available.
Spirit is Mel Chin’s meditation on the “tall-grass prairie,” a lost American landscape that once extended from Minnesota to Texas. The monumental barrel—nine feet in diameter and seemingly precariously balanced—recalls the casks that were so essential to American frontier life for transporting and storing grains, pork, oil, liquor, and gunpowder. By the late nineteenth century, the increasing demands of agriculture, commerce, and industry had set in motion an inexorable reshaping of the landscape. This process resulted in the reduction of the indigenous ecosystem to, in Chin’s words, “a thin green line,” rep- resented here by the rope that is woven of endangered grasses, which he received permission to cut and use.
