Courtesy of Creative Machines Courtesy of Creative Machines
George Rhoads, an artist whose whimsical sculptures of balls rolling and dropping through elaborate constructions of rails, coils and pendulums are found in museums, airports and shopping malls around the world, died July 9 at his caregiver’s home in Loudun, France. He was 95.
The death was confirmed by his children, Emma Rhoads and Paul Rhoads, who said there was no specific cause.
As a child, Mr. Rhoads enjoyed taking apart clocks and once built a scale model of a Ferris wheel. He studied painting and became a master of origami paper design, but he became best known for what he called his “audiokinetic sculptures,” which he began making in the 1960s.
His creations, which ranged from tabletop size to more than 40 feet high, resembled a combination of planetariums, construction girders, carnival rides and pinball machines. The inspirations for his “ball machines” included the moving sculptures of Alexander Calder, the comic drawings of Rube Goldberg and the twisting ride of a roller coaster.
Mr. Rhoads spent months creating elaborately drawn designs, which resembled multicolored blueprints in their precision and detail. For years, he built the complex mechanisms himself, welding together metal frameworks with a dizzying array of channels, curving tracks, tubes, wheels and pendulums that carried balls on a circuitous journey, propelled only by gravity.
“Each pathway that the ball takes is a different drama, as I call it,” Mr. Rhoads said in a filmed interview with Creative Machines, an Arizona company that has manufactured and restored some of his sculptures.
“The events happen in a certain sequence analogous to drama, where the ball gets into certain difficulties. It does a few things, maybe there’s some conflict … and then there’s some kind of dramatic conclusion.”
The effect of the ingeniously built machines can be spellbinding, as viewers often watch in rapt wonder. More than a visual puzzle, Mr. Rhoads’s sculptures also have an auditory element, as the balls clank together, roll through springs or metal bowls and trigger levers that ring gongs or plock against a hollow box.
“They embody almost every basic element of machinery, combined in a bewildering variety of ways,” artist and Princeton University professor James Seawright told the New York Times in 1987. “There’s a level of mechanical genius behind inventing complex mechanisms; that’s what George has.”
One of Mr. Rhoads’s first ball machines, his daughter said, was called “Homage to Beethoven,” in which balls landed on tuned keys, sounding out the first notes of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. Another, called “Based on Balls,” which was installed at the Arizona Diamondbacks’ stadium in Phoenix in 1998, contains stair-stepped xylophone keys. When struck by dropping balls, they play “Take Me Out to the Ballgame.”
Beginning in the late 1960s, Mr. Rhoads had a patron, David Bermant, who commissioned more than a dozen sculptures for shopping malls he owned around the country. From 1985 to about 2007, Mr. Rhoads worked with Bob McGuire, whose studio in Ithaca, N.Y., assembled much of his work. Mr. Rhoads produced more than 300 ball-machine sculptures, which can be found at Logan International Airport in Boston, science museums, children’s hospitals, shopping malls from Cincinnati to Seoul and in various museum collections, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
One of his first works to gain wide recognition was “42nd Street Ballroom,” which was installed in the lobby of New York’s Port Authority bus terminal in 1983. Two dozen billiard balls roll on tracks, striking a series of devices that set off a tintinnabulation of bells, chimes and metallic clinks.
“I want to make my machines accessible,” Mr. Rhoads told NPR in 2002. “I don’t want to put anything in the piece that is incomprehensible. There’s no intervening technology. You’re confronting it eye to eye, and everything is tangible and real.”
George Pitney Rhoads was born Jan. 27, 1926, in Evanston, Ill. His father was a medical doctor, his mother a homemaker with a strong interest in the arts.
Mr. Rhoads often tinkered with watch and clock mechanisms as a child and began drawing at an early age. He served in the Army during World War II and studied engineering at the University of Wisconsin before graduating from the University of Chicago. He studied painting at the Art Institute of Chicago and, during the early 1950s, an art school in Paris. He became adept at the Japanese art of origami, devising inventive ways to fold paper in the shape of animals and other three-dimensional objects.
Courtesy of Creative Machines
Courtesy of Creative Machines
Artist George Rhoads.
While trying to build a career as a painter, Mr. Rhoads moved to New York and worked as a medical illustrator and commercial artist. In the early 1960s, he began assisting Hans Van de Bovenkamp, an artist who often incorporated fountains in his outdoor sculptures.
The flowing water led Mr. Rhoads to explore the idea of movement, or kineticism, in art. Building on his interest in engineering, he began to build his first kinetic sculptures. He was featured on “The David Frost Show” in 1972 and on “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood” in 1999 but was almost 60, his family said, before he began to earn substantial sums for his artwork.
Mr. Rhoads moved from Manhattan to Martha’s Vineyard, Mass., where he was a yoga instructor, then lived in Upstate New York, ultimately settling near Ithaca. He also wrote fiction and composed music. For the past four years, he lived in France with his son.
Mr. Rhoads was married five times and, according to his family, had several other long-term relationships with women. His fifth wife, Marcelle Toor, died in 2009. Survivors include two children, Daisy Emma Rhoads of Brooklyn and Paul Rhoads of Chinon, France, both from his third marriage, to Shirley Gabis; two sisters; and a grandchild.
“Why I did it is simply because it’s fun to do,” Mr. Rhoads said in 1988, explaining the idea behind one of his ball-machine sculptures. “The piece itself has no useful purpose. It’s a machine that plays instead of works.”
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