Driving Forces: Sculpture by Lin Emery

JANE AND HARRY WILLSON SCULPTURE GARDEN AND ALONZO AND VALLYE DUDLEY GALLERY

This exhibition features kinetic sculptures by the internationally recognized New Orleans artist Lin Emery. Four large-scale sculptures, made to move in the wind, will be on view in the Jane and Harry Willson Sculpture Garden, while smaller sculptures will be exhibited indoors. Executed in either polished or brushed aluminum, the sculptures take their cue from music, dance and natural forms, especially flowers and trees, both in their shapes and in how they respond to a passing breeze. Equal parts delicate and strong, her sculptures also reflect her adopted home through her use of industrial materials, such as polished marine aluminum, which is often used for boat building in that port city.

Lin’s early life was marked by restlessness. Born in New York City, she moved often and had a peripatetic educational journey, eventually studying at the Sorbonne in Paris. It was there she met and studied under famed Russian sculptor Ossip Zadkine before settling in New Orleans. Emery’s work is in the collections of the National Museum of American Art in Washington, D.C.; the New Orleans Museum of Art; the Walter P. Chrysler Museum in Norfolk, Virginia; the Delaware Museum of Art in Wilmington; the Museum of Foreign Art in Sofia, Bulgaria; and the Flint Institute of Art in Michigan. She received the Louisiana Governor’s Arts Award in 2001, an honorary doctorate from Loyola University of New Orleans in 2004 and the National Academy Museum of New York’s S. Simon Sculpture Award, and has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions, including a retrospective at the New Orleans Museum of Art in 1996.