Public Art at Yale

Gallows and Lollipops
Nathan Hale Statue
Memorial Quadrangle Gate
Theodore Dwight Woolsey Statue
Education (Chittenden Memorial Stained Glass Window)
Giamatti Bench
Abraham Pierson Statue
Richard Serra’s Stacks consisting of two rectangular steel masses
Atmosphere and Environment XI
The Women’s Table
Alma Mater
Selin Courtyard Fountain
Repeat and Reverse geometry artwork
Robert Engman’s twenty-foot reinforced concrete Column
Untitled sculpture
Untitled sculpture
Law Links Generations sculpture
Sculpture Screen
Two Planes Vertical–Horizontal II kinetic sculpture
Floating Helmets sculpture
Indeterminate Line sculpture
Calligraph Gee III sculpture
Untitled sculpture
Modern Head sculpture
Benjamin Silliman, Sr. statue
Trees artwork
Ledyard Flagstaff
The Garden (Pyramid, Sun, and Cube) artwork
Gallows and Lollipops kinetic sculpture
Peace, Devotion, Memory, and Courage sculptures
1 of 30
Gallows and Lollipops

Exceptional museum collections are the foundation of the public life of art at Yale, but the University’s commitment to art as a public trust does not end at the museum door. From the Old Campus to Science Hill, from Branford College to Memorial Hall, works of art sited in courtyards or plazas, lobbies or lecture halls, inspire reflection and offer aesthetic pleasure. Hallmarks of the remarkable cultural life of this institution, they lend a public face to Yale’s educational mission. The much beloved statue of Revolutionary War hero Nathan Hale,  Claes Oldenburg’s pop art icon Lipstick (Ascending) on Caterpillar Tracks, and Maya Lin’s The Women’s Table are but three of the many treasures visible around the campus. We invite you to learn more about them on this Web site, and to visit them yourself using the  self-guided tour map.

Read a statement from the director of the Yale Art Gallery.

Nathan Hale Statue

Nathan Hale, 1913

Architect: Bela Lyon Pratt (1867-1917, B.F.A. 1899)
Location: Old Campus

An idealized bronze statue honors the heroism of Yale College graduate Nathan Hale (1755-1776; B.A. 1773, M.A. 1776), a young schoolteacher captured and executed by the British during the American Revolution. Hale’s youth and defiant last words, inscribed on the statue’s base, made him a national hero, and his legend remained powerful over a century after his death when alumni donated this monument. Unable to afford the renowned Gilded Age sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens, they commissioned the piece from his former assistant, Bela Pratt, who had studied at the Yale School of the Fine Arts under John Ferguson Weir. Combining dignity and beauty with a traditional martyr pose, Pratt’s statue stands beside Connecticut Hall, where Hale lived as a student.

A gift to Yale College by graduates and friends, 1914

Memorial Quadrangle Gate

Memorial Quadrangle Gate, 1918-22

Architect: Samuel Yellin (1885-1940)
Location: High Street, at Harkness Tower

Samuel Yellin was a master craftsman known for designing works of art out of a single piece of iron, instead of tacking pieces together. Yale has ten hand-forged gates by Yellin—as well as numerous examples of decorative ironwork, from door handles and hinges to radiator grilles—the majority of them on buildings designed by James Gamble Rogers. The most spectacular is the wrought iron gate of the Memorial Quadrangle, forged at  Yellin’s metalworking shop in Philadelphia. It is divided into panels that contain shields, helmets, soldiers, weapons, and the crests of the five branches of the armed services.

Gift of Mrs. Stephen V. Harkness

Theodore Dwight Woolsey Statue

Theodore Dwight Woolsey, 1896

Architect: John Ferguson Weir (1841-1926; M.A.H. 1871)
Location: Old Campus

During his long tenure as president of Yale from 1846 to 1871, Theodore Dwight Woolsey (1801-1889; B.A. 1820, M.A. 1823) oversaw the creation of the Yale School of the Fine Arts and hired John Ferguson Weir as its first director in 1869. On its low pedestal in the middle of Old Campus, Weir’s massive bronze statue of Woolsey has a forceful presence, serving as both a memorial and a symbol of learning and wisdom. The sculptor emphasized Woolsey’s academic career as a former professor of Greek by seating him on a Greek Revival klismos chair wearing heavy classicized robes; the Greek inscription on the back of the chair reads “the most excellent, the most wise, the most just.” The enormous head conveys the “scholarly features and piercing eye” that Weir recalled vividly from their first meeting, and generations of students have rubbed the protruding foot for good luck. The art professor created the statue as a gift from alumni, and today it illustrates the joint roles of Weir and Woolsey as founders of Yale’s rich artistic tradition.

Anonymous alumni gift, 1896

Education (Chittenden Memorial Stained Glass Window)

Education (Chittenden Memorial Window), 1889-90

Architect: Louis Comfort Tiffany (1848-1933) for Tiffany Glass Company
Location: Linsley-Chittenden Hall

Following the death of his daughter Mary Hartwell Lusk in 1871, long-time New Haven resident and Yale patron Simeon Baldwin Chittenden funded the building of a new university library in her memory. Its octagonal reading room, now a lecture hall, holds the structure’s crown jewel, the stained glass window Education, commissioned from Art Nouveau artist and decorator Louis Comfort Tiffany. Known for his mosaics, lamps, furniture, glass, and metalware, Tiffany sought to elevate the industrial arts through constant pursuit of beauty and refinement, often basing designs on floral forms and inventing new glassmaking techniques and colors to rival competitors like John La Farge. In this thirty-foot-wide window, Tiffany composed a visual sermon in keeping with the donor’s values, presenting a panorama of graceful allegorical figures that represent aspects of Art, Music (shown here), Science, and Religion.

Gift of Simeon B. Chittenden, M.A.H. 1871

Giamatti Bench

Giamatti Bench, 1990

Architect: David Sellers (b. 1938; B.S. 1960, M.Arch. 1965) and James Sardonis (b. 1951)
Location: Old Campus

The bench honoring Yale English professor and president A. Bartlett Giamatti (1938-1989; B.A. 1960, Ph.D. 1964) is not the traditional teaching endowment, but a functional memorial, a semicircular seat inscribed with a quote to literally express Giamatti’s lifelong dedication to academics. The almost seamless twin sections of the Giamatti Bench represent the complementary character of the student/teacher relationship, and its variety of surface textures suggests that education is a process of refinement analogous to carving in its progression from rough to smooth and polished. Classmate and architect David Sellers designed the bench in collaboration with sculptor Jim Sardonis, and the twenty-ton black granite block displays the interest in rustic materials and natural forms that characterizes both men’s Vermont-based work.

Gift of the Class of 1960 in 1990

Abraham Pierson Statue

Abraham Pierson, 1874

Architect: Launt Thompson (1833-1894; M.A.H. 1874)
Location: Old Campus

Civic pride inspired towns across the nation to build Civil War memorials in the 1870s, making large-scale public sculpture a permanent feature in the American landscape. Yale joined this trend in 1874 with a bronze statue honoring Abraham Pierson (1641/5-1707), the college’s first rector (or president) from 1701 to 1707. Lacking a likeness of Pierson, Irish-born sculptor Launt Thompson used portraits of the rector’s descendants to compose an idealized face. The Shakespearean actor Edwin Booth may have posed for the work, lending it all the dignity and force that made Booth’s portrayals of Hamlet famous on the stages of New York and London.

Gift of Charles Morgan to Yale University, 1874

Richard Serra’s Stacks consisting of two rectangular steel masses

Stacks, 1990

Architect: Richard Serra (b. 1939; B.F.A. 1962, M.F.A. 1964)
Location: Yale University Art Gallery, York Street courtyard

Richard Serra’s Stacks consists of two rectangular steel masses, each 93 inches high x 96 inches wide x 10 inches deep. As originally installed in the Sculpture Hall of the Art Gallery (shown here), they were inserted into the floor at an angle of 2.3 degrees from the vertical, centered on a long axis, and placed parallel to each other, sixty feet apart. The viewer entered the field created by the magnetism between the two elements, and engaged in a dynamic relationship with the work as he or she moved around and through the space defined by the sculpture’s presence. Stacks was created as a site-specific piece for the Sculpture Hall of the Art Gallery’s Swartwout building, but Serra re-sited the sculpture in the outdoor sunken courtyard of the Kahn building when the renovation of the building was completed in 2006.

Katharine Ordway Fund, 1990

Atmosphere and Environment XI

Atmosphere and Environment XI, 1969

Architect: Fabricated 1971 Louise Nevelson (1899-1988)
Location: Yale University Art Gallery Sculpture Garden

At twelve feet tall, Louise Nevelson’s Atmosphere and Environment XI looms over viewers, dominating its setting and dramatically reshaping perception of the surrounding space. The Russian-born artist’s earlier indoor wall sculptures were grids constructed of discarded wooden crates, filled with architectural fragments and other found objects and painted a uniform black. The surface of this cor-ten steel construction presents a similar web of suggestively shaped shadows, here semitransparent like a bank of windows which ultimately screens more than it reveals. The tension between the work’s curving natural forms and rigid rectangles abstractly implies an inner psychic conflict and the influence of surrealism. At the same time, the sculpture’s totemic monumentality and geometric composition echo forms common in Maya art and architecture, which Nevelson also admired.

Seymour H. Knox, B.A. 1920, Fund, 1971

The Women’s Table

The Women’s Table, 1993

Architect: Maya Lin (b. 1959; B.A. 1981, M.Arch. 1986, D.F.A. 1987)
Location: Rose Walk, by Sterling Memorial Library

Maya Lin’s monument-making began during her undergraduate years at Yale, with her 1981 design for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C. Like the black wall of names cutting into the grassy Mall, the simple granite blocks of Lin’s Women’s Table organically emerge from the pavement as both a lament and a tribute. A string of figures marks the number of female students at Yale each year since its founding in 1701. These numbers grow with time as they spiral out toward the table’s edge, swelling like the rings of water that bubble from the central spring and spill over on all sides.

Anonymous gift, commissioned in 1989 and installed in 1993

Alma Mater

Alma Mater, 1932

Architect: Eugene Francis Savage (1883-1978; B.F.A. 1924)
Location: Sterling Memorial Library

Amid the tumultuous artistic revolutions of the early twentieth century, Eugene Savage remained an advocate of continuity, tradition, and a scholarly model of art-making. Trained in Rome and at the Yale School of the Fine Arts, he later returned to Yale as decorator of the newly built Sterling Memorial Library and as a professor of painting, serving on the faculty for twenty-eight years. Like his Latin American contemporaries Diego Rivera and José Clemente Orozco, Savage created murals in the 1930s as powerful public statements, but his large-scale works contain not political but academic messages, commending settings like the libraries of Columbia and Yale to elite and studious audiences. The central figure in Alma Mater thus embodies the University by dressing in the school colors and holding a book bearing Yale’s motto, “Lux et Veritas.” She stands under the tree of knowledge, and allegorical figures of Light, Truth, Science, Labor, Music, Divinity, Literature, and the Arts pay her homage.

John W. Sterling, B.A. 1864, Bequest

Selin Courtyard Fountain

Selin Courtyard Fountain, Mid-1930s

Architect: Beatrix Jones Farrand (1872-1959; M.A.H. 1926)
Location: Selin Courtyard, Sterling Memorial Library

In the 1930s, Beatrix Farrand, consulting landscape gardener at Yale from 1922 to 1945, designed the landscaping and the fountain for what is now the Selin Courtyard in Sterling Memorial Library. She originally placed a small, tile-lined pool with a water jet at the center of the court, but later decided that an architectural type of fountain would be a more fitting focal point. After studying lead ornamental fountains in the United States and England, Farrand chose a small cistern design. She commissioned the London foundry H. Crowther Ltd., established in 1908 and still in business today, to make a fountain compounded from several of their old dies, in the ancient manner: the shape from one set, the medallions from another, and the numerals from still another. The four putti on dolphins were also cast from old molds.

John W. Sterling, B.A. 1864, Bequest

Repeat and Reverse geometry artwork

Repeat and Reverse, 1963

Architect: Josef Albers (1888-1976; M.A.H. 1950, D.F.A. 1962)
Location: Art & Architecture Building, on the York Street facade

As a student and instructor at the progressive Bauhaus school in Germany in the 1920s, Josef Albers began exploring the relationship between perception and geometry. When the school was closed by the Nazis in 1933, he moved to the United States and eventually settled with his wife and fellow artist, Anni, in Connecticut, teaching art at Yale from 1950 to 1960. In Repeat and Reverse, Albers used stainless steel bars to reproduce a line drawing of an optical illusion. Although the corners of this flat sculpture appear to project and recede, the suggested volumes contradict one another, trapping the eye in an endless circuit along the shiny lines. Like his famous series of paintings Homage to the Square, this work demonstrates the complex perceptual effects that can stem from relatively simple visual forms. It was one of several sculptures created specifically for the exterior of Yale’s then new Art & Architecture Building at the invitation of architect Paul Rudolph.

Gift of the artist, made possible by a grant from the Graham Foundation, Chicago, 1963

Robert Engman’s twenty-foot reinforced concrete Column

Column, 1963

Architect: Robert Engman (b. 1927; M.F.A. 1955)
Location: Art & Architecture Building, on the Chapel Street facade

The coarse, banded walls of Paul Rudolph’s Art & Architecture Building emphasize the verticality of Robert Engman’s twenty-foot reinforced concrete Column. The artist studied and taught sculpture at Yale in the 1950s, contributing this work to the new building shortly before his move to the University of Pennsylvania. Embossed along its front corners are the names of his colleagues and mentors at Yale, including the architect Rudolph and fellow sculptors Josef Albers and James Rosati. Engman created a union of flatness and depth by piercing the pillar’s rectangular faces with irregular tunnels. This honeycomb of holes relocates all stability from the work’s core to its edges. The curved surfaces turn inward, inverting the usual formal properties of a solid round column and making the piece a study in sculptural contradiction.

Gift of the artist, made possible by a grant from the Graham Foundation, Chicago, 1963

Untitled sculpture

Untitled, ca. 1965

Architect: Alexander Liberman (1912-1999)
Location: Art & Architecture Building

Ukranian-born Alexander Liberman influenced American art and design for decades through his work as a sculptor, painter, and editor for fashion magazines like Vogue. His large-scale sculptures combine slices of inexpensive found objects, such as farm machinery and commercial boilers. Although each resulting geometric element has a distinct character, a solid coat of black paint unites them harmoniously, focusing the viewer’s attention on the interaction of their curved forms. Liberman worked on such projects without plans or preliminary drawings in order to make each abstract construction a unique compositional gesture.

Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Burton G. Tremaine, Jr., B.A. 1944, to the Yale Schools of Art and Architecture

Untitled sculpture

Untitled, 1960

Architect: Costantino Nivola (1911-1988)
Location: Ezra Stiles College Courtyard

Sardinian-American artist Costantino Nivola worked with architect Eero Saarinen to create thirty-five sculptural ornaments for Ezra Stiles and Morse Colleges. Scattered throughout the complex, they mimic their surroundings in texture and color due to Nivola’s technique of casting concrete forms from sand molds. Curved indentations resembling fossils break their blocky surfaces to enliven each heavy mass, romantically suggesting age and endurance within a modern space. By uniting abstract shapes and natural materials, Nivola bridged the style of 1950s paintings by his friends Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning with the timeless atmosphere of the Italian village where he was born. The objects crouch and project like cubist counterparts to the neo-Gothic gargoyles elsewhere on campus.

Law Links Generations sculpture

Law Links Generations, 1991

Architect: Paul Jeffries (b. 1950)
Location: Law School Courtyard

Law Links Generations, by contemporary American artist Paul Jeffries, was the winning design in an international competition to commemorate the centennial anniversary of the Yale Law Journal.Stylized human figures form the central segments of two symmetrical, interlocking bronze spirals, inspired by a quote from former U.S. Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.: “Law, like a great chain, links generation to generation, holding society together.” Jeffries’s hands-on hammering of details is evident in the smooth figures, while the overall compositional simplicity recalls his training under eminent modernist sculptors Henry Moore and Emilio Greco.

Sculpture Screen

Sculpture Screen, 1958

Architect: Harry Bertoia (1915-1978)
Location: Lobby of Davies Auditorium, Becton Center

Experimenting with the use of metal in furniture-making and sculpture, Harry Bertoia expanded the possibilities and concerns of modern art. Sculpture Screen is one of his so-called multiplane constructions, a series of uniform shapes welded together in a loose pattern. Five horizontal rows of golden rectangles project at differing levels from the three anchoring poles, creating a continuous undulating field. The work’s large size invites viewers to walk its length and observe the play of light at different angles on its reflective, textured surfaces. Sculpture Screen thus uses light to create the illusion of movement, unifying its broken space and prefiguring the increasing geometric simplicity and minimalism of Bertoia’s later work.

Gift of the International Business Machines Corporation, 1966

Two Planes Vertical–Horizontal II kinetic sculpture

Two Planes Vertical–Horizontal II, 1969-70

Architect: George Warren Rickey (1907-2002)
Location: Pierson College Courtyard

George Rickey’s earliest works of kinetic sculpture were mobiles in the manner of Alexander Calder, but in mature pieces like Two Planes Vertical–Horizontal II, the artist eschewed all representation and sought to isolate the concept of movement as the sole subject on display. Rickey’s interest in the lyrical dance between the physical forces of gravity and wind began during World War II through his job computing ballistics in B-52 bombers. He later carefully constructed his large-scale sculptures to be a delicate balance of counterweights that react to the subtlest atmospheric conditions to achieve constant non-motorized motion. In this piece, the burnished stainless steel plates shimmer to make more visible their slow and graceful rotations, and viewers are meant to sense the passing of time as they observe the unpredictable yet repetitive patterns of movement.

Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Richard Shields, B.A. 1929, in 1970 

Floating Helmets sculpture

Floating Helmets, 1965

Architect: Dimitri Hadzi (1921-2006)
Location: Jonathan Edwards College Courtyard

Dimitri Hadzi’s giant sculpture Floating Helmets breaks from the style of its bronze neighbors on Old Campus with a bold and evocative combination of representation and abstraction. Many of Hadzi’s works feature shield-like shapes or massive hemispheric helmet forms, which recall the caps of ancient warriors and pay tribute to the artist’s Greek heritage. Here the heavy dome atop spindly forms also resembles a turtle shell or mushroom cloud, opposing images of safety and destruction. The work’s mottled surfaces suggest the wear of age while echoing the impressionist texture of Auguste Rodin’s anguished figures in bronze. Size and scale make this work an emblem of transcendence, a battered artifact which seems to speak of a heroic past.

Gift of Leonard C. Hanna, Jr., B.A. 1913, Fund, 1965

Indeterminate Line sculpture

Indeterminate Line, 1994

Architect: Bernar Venet (b. 1941)
Location: 34 Hillhouse Avenue, by Luce Hall

Bernar Venet created numerous Indeterminate Line works in the 1980s and 1990s by bending and twisting long square rods of steel with an overhead crane. Despite this unvarying method, these sculptures are symbols of individuality and freedom. The irregularities of the coil illustrate the weight and strength of the steel itself as it resisted the artist’s control, thereby defining artistic creation as cooperation between man and material. Venet’s early work in the 1960s explored the impersonal laws of physics and math to liberate art from aesthetic rules. This later piece grants the object independence in a new way by interpreting the imperfections in its graceful steel curves as moments of vitality and nonconformity to logical ideals.

Gift of Marion J. Lebworth, B.A. 1948, in honor of Henry Luce III, B.A. 1945W

Calligraph Gee III sculpture

Calligraph Gee III, 1964

Architect: Herbert Ferber (1906-1991)
Location: Timothy Dwight College Courtyard

Herbert Ferber’s works are based on drawings, and here the act of sculptural creation is directly compared to writing. The title of the piece connects its sweeping copper curves to the graceful brushstrokes of calligraphy, celebrating the fluid movement of the artist’s hand as he explores the formal properties of line and space. The beams overlap like a collage of painted lines, suggesting the abstract expressionist canvases of Ferber’s friends Barnett Newman and Robert Motherwell.

Gift of the artist, 1969

Untitled sculpture

Untitled, 1960

Architect: Raoul Ubac (1910-1985)
Location: Sunken courtyard, near Kline Biology Tower

The chance discovery of a piece of slate in 1946 inspired Belgian-born sculptor, painter, and photographer Raoul Ubac to explore this medium’s physical properties and sculptural potential. He became fascinated with its soft surface and easy response to the chisel, crafting it into stylized human torsos or abstract relief carvings such as Untitled. Close parallel incisions add a vivid texture to portions of his works and heighten the illusion of depth. Here the gray stone acts as a window to break the monotony of the brick wall, and its naturally smooth planes vaguely suggest objects in a busy landscape.

Gift of Mrs. David Thompson to Kline Science Library, 1968

Modern Head sculpture

Modern Head, 1974/1989

Architect: Roy Lichtenstein (1923-1997)
Location: Sachem Street at Hillhouse Avenue, below Science Hill

Crowning Hillhouse Avenue at the base of Science Hill stands Roy Lichtenstein’s Modern Head, a thirty-one-foot-tall stainless steel silhouette. Famous for his 1960s pop art paintings, which imitated the printed look of comic books, Lichtenstein often used his work to poke fun at existing trends in modern art. Translating the forceful brushstrokes of 1950s abstract expressionism into frozen comic book style allowed the artist to gently imply that such paintings had become familiar, formulaic, and meaningless. Similarly, Modern Head targets the mechanized style of purist painters like Fernand Léger, a bold look when introduced around 1920. Reproducing it in exaggerated scale with flashy, futuristic materials, Lichtenstein questioned this outdated, dehumanizing aesthetic’s continued domination of the definition of “modern” in the 1970s and 1980s.

To commemorate the inauguration of Richard C. Levin, Ph.D. 1974, presented to Yale University in 1993 by Jeffrey H. Loria, B.A. 1962, and James Goodman

Benjamin Silliman, Sr. statue

Benjamin Silliman, Sr., 1881-84

Architect: John Ferguson Weir (1841-1926; M.A.H. 1871)
Location: Sterling Chemistry Laboratory, facing Prospect Street

Although this statue’s plaque and current location on Science Hill honor Benjamin Silliman, Sr. (1779-1864; B.A. 1796, M.A. 1799) as a pioneering professor of chemistry and natural history, its original viewers would have equally remembered Silliman for his passion for the visual arts. In addition to helping found the School of Medicine and the Sheffield Scientific School, Silliman brokered Yale’s acquisition of John Trumbull’s collection of paintings in 1832, thereby creating America’s first university art gallery, which he curated until his death in 1864. The portly eight-foot bronze figure of Silliman, shown lecturing on a crystal held in his right hand, is the first sculptural work by Yale School of the Fine Arts director John Ferguson Weir, a well-known painter of industrial scenes who learned to work in three dimensions specifically for this project.

Gift of the friends and students of the sitter, 1884

Trees artwork

Trees, 2000-03

Architect: Robert Venturi (b. 1925; D.F.A. 1979) for Venturi, Scott Brown & Associates, Inc.
Location: Anlyan Center

Trees flanks the west side of the Anlyan Center along Howard Avenue, serving as a colorful mediator between the massive School of Medicine research facility and the adjacent “Hill” residential neighborhood. For architect Robert Venturi, these twenty-five-foot-tall artificially evergreen objects form a carefully planned playful moment, a whimsical touch tempering the functional simplicity of his otherwise unadorned brick and limestone complex. In keeping with the postmodern style that Venturi developed in the late 1960s, the clusters of aluminum circles signify his rejection of the rigid formalism of Eero Saarinen, Louis Kahn, and others under whom he trained. Preserving the vernacular traditions and human qualities of built spaces, his work embraces context and community.

Ledyard Flagstaff

Ledyard Flagstaff, 1908

Architect: John Carrère (1858-1911) and Thomas Hastings (1860-1929) Yale Alumni War Memorial, 1926-27 Thomas Hastings and Everett V. Meeks (1879-1954)
Location: Hewitt University Quadrangle (Beinecke Plaza)

After winning the design competition for the New York Public Library in 1897, the prominent architectural firm of Carrère & Hastings employed a similar French-inspired Beaux-Arts style for Yale’s Bicentennial Buildings (Memorial Hall, Commons, and Woolsey Hall), completed in 1901. The firm embellished this complex in 1908 with the Ledyard Flagstaff, given in memory of a young alumnus killed in the Spanish-American War. Hastings again amended the space two decades later, collaborating with Yale School of the Fine Arts Dean Everett V. Meeks on a World War I memorial cenotaph and Corinthian colonnade with battle names across its entablature. The stylized Art Deco carvings on the sandstone and slate altar to liberty include eagles and ornamental garlands like those on the flagpole, here interwoven with tanks, guns, and other elements of modern technological warfare.

Flagstaff: Erected by members of the Class of 1898.
War Memorial: Erected by the graduates of Yale University

The Garden (Pyramid, Sun, and Cube) artwork

The Garden (Pyramid, Sun, and Cube), 1963

Architect: Isamu Noguchi (1904-1988)
Location: Hewitt University Quadrangle (Beinecke Plaza)

Japanese-American sculptor and landscape architect Isamu Noguchi designed this work for the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library in one of several collaborative efforts with architect Gordon Bunshaft. Garden extends the creamy Vermont marble surfaces of the library’s paneled walls into its sunken courtyard. The cold materials of the space inspire not emotion but contemplation, reinforcing a studious atmosphere in the adjacent underground reading room. The mood is that of a Japanese Zen garden, quietly balancing cosmic forces symbolized by the circle (the sun and its energy), the pyramid (the earth and its history), and the poised cube (chance). This synthesis of East and West also unites past and future by suggesting both the marble flagstones of an Italian piazza and the surreal landscape of the moon.

Gift of Edwin J. Beinecke, B.A. 1907, Frederick W. Beinecke, Ph.B. 1909, and Walter Beinecke, B.A. 1910, to the Yale University Library, 1963

Gallows and Lollipops kinetic sculpture

Gallows and Lollipops, 1960

Architect: Alexander Calder (1898-1976)
Location: Hewitt University Quadrangle (Beinecke Plaza)

The moving parts of Alexander Calder’s kinetic sculptures decorate and energize public spaces across the world. As the painted steel plates of Gallows and Lollipops hover and seesaw around the tip of their red tripod base, they obey chance atmospheric stimuli to destabilize the grid of Beinecke Plaza. Developed in the 1930s, the mobile became Calder’s trademark, combining influences from the avant-garde artists of prewar Paris. While his primary colors follow the purist palette of Piet Mondrian, the animated geometric shapes resemble the abstracted objects and animals in the surrealist paintings of Joan Miró and Paul Klee. This work’s title converts the swaying arms into images both delightful and unsettling, suggesting the endless flux and precarious balance of forces at work within the unconscious mind.

Anonymous gift, 1975

Peace, Devotion, Memory, and Courage sculptures

Peace, Devotion, Memory, and Courage, 1913

Architect: Henry Hering (1874-1949)
Location: Memorial Hall

Henry Hering’s four allegorical sculptures punctuate the progression of names inscribed in the marble walls of Memorial Hall. Guarding a history of sacrifice in war by Yale graduates, these figures carved in high relief recall antique funerary statues to declare the timelessness of this mausoleum-like space. Dynamic crevices and profound shadows temper the rigid austerity of the cold marble bodies, connecting this monument stylistically to the work of Hering’s mentor, the celebrated turn-of-the-century American sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens. The contrast of rippling drapery against smooth stone skin repeats the texture of neoclassical architecture, inviting touch and further integrating the vertical quartet, like fluted columns, into their built environment.

Dedicated by the University to the men of Yale who gave their lives in the Civil War.