Kenneth Duane Snelson (June 29, 1927 – December 22, 2016) was an American contemporary sculptor and photographer. His sculptural works, exemplified by Needle Tower, are composed of flexible and rigid components arranged according to the idea of tensegrity, although Snelson preferred the descriptive term floating compression.
Snelson said his former professor Buckminster Fuller took credit for Snelson's discovery of the concept that Fuller named tensegrity. Fuller gave the idea its name, combining 'tension' and 'structural integrity.' Kārlis Johansons had exhibited tensegrity sculptures several years before Snelson was even born. The height and strength of Snelson's sculptures, which are often delicate in appearance, depend on the tension between rigid pipes and flexible cables.
Biography
Snelson was born in Pendleton, Oregon, in 1927. He studied at the University of Oregon in Eugene, at the Black Mountain College, and with Fernand Léger in Paris. His sculpture and photography have been exhibited at over 25 one-man shows in galleries around the world including the structurally seminal Park Place Gallery in New York in the 1960s. Snelson also did research on the shape of the atom. Snelson continued to work in his SoHo studio, occasionally collaborating with animator Jonathan Monaghan. He lived in New York City with his wife, Katherine.
He held five United States patents: #3,169,611: Discontinuous Compression Structures, February 1965; #3,276,148: Model for Atomic Forms, October 1966; #4,099,339: Model for Atomic Forms, July 1978; and #6,017,220: Magnetic Geometric Building System; and most recently, #6,739,937: Space Frame Structure Made by 3-D Weaving of Rod Members, May 25, 2004.
Snelson was a founding member of ConStruct, the artist-owned gallery that promoted and organized large-scale sculpture exhibitions throughout the United States. Other founding members include Mark di Suvero, John Raymond Henry, Lyman Kipp and Charles Ginnever. Snelson was also a pioneer of digital art, using a Silicon Graphics machine to produce artistic images in the 1980s.
After suffering from prostate cancer, Snelson died on December 22, 2016, at the age of 89.
During his early years as an art student, Snelson drew an interest for the tensegrity approach. Buckminster Fuller formalized a lot of the concept, but Snelson clearly contributed to its development. Through his proximity with Bauhaus artists (Léger) and Abstract expressionists painter (de Kooning), Snelson was mainly drawn to the exploration of tensegrity and space. He claimed he developed his own empirical mathematics system to create his structures, but denies being a mathematician. He says he never found a way to formalize through mathematics the logic of his structures, and never met someone who could.
Honours and awards
(1999) Lifetime Achievement in Contemporary Sculpture Award, International Sculpture Center.
Sculptures in public collections and public spaces
Heartney, Eleanor, Kenneth Snelson: forces made visible/essay by Eleanor Heartney; additional text by Kenneth Snelson, Lenox, Massachusetts: Hard Press Editions, 2009.
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