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Image of That's a Small Island with Snow and Frozen Water

That's a Small Island with Snow and Frozen Water
Sculpture

1970-1975
9 7/8 x 7 11/16 x 9 7/8 in. (25.08 x 19.53 x 25.08 cm)

Sam Richardson (Oakland, California, 1934 - May 3, 2013, Seattle, WA)

Object Type: Sculpture
Medium and Support: Acrylic and Plexiglas
Credit Line: Gift of the artist and Adrienne Richardson, Museum purchase
Accession Number: 1975.04

Exhibition

A Point Stretched: Views on Time, November 4, 2022 – July 9, 2023, Plaza and Gibson Galleries, San José Museum of Art.

Indestructible Wonder, April 18, 2016 - January 29, 2017, Second Floor, Central and North Galleries, San José Museum of Art.

Edge Conditions, Part 1: June 3, 2006 - February 18, 2007 / May 20, 2007, Part 2: July 29, 2006 - November 26, 2006, New Wing, Second Floor, North, South, and Central Skylight Galleries, San José Museum of Art.

SJMA Label Text


Edge Conditions (2006)

Sam Richardson’s innovative sculptures of the late 1960s and early 1970s helped to push the boundaries of the evolving landscape art genre. He began teaching at San Jose State in 1964, at a time when “Everybody was experimenting with plastics,” he once reminisced in an interview. The rolling contours of bring to mind the geographic terrain often captured through aerial photography, while its square configuration recalls the demarcation of topographical maps. Richardson's un-peopled, anonymous, imaginary landscape functions as a visual and conceptual ripple from C5's aluminum sculptures, Analogous Landscape, visible across the gallery.


Indestructible Wonder (2016-2017)

Prompted by his love of nature, Sam Richardson painted and sculpted representational landscapes, which are often square in format, using shaped plastics and acrylics. In That’s a Small Island with Snow and Frozen Water, Richardson fabricated a section of contoured land from Plexiglas. Emerging from a sea of cerulean blue, the snow-capped island is marked by delicate shadows that appear on its gentle slopes. The sculpture’s rolling contours bring to mind the geographic terrain familiar from aerial photography, while its square configuration recalls the gridlike conventions of topographical maps. But Richardson’s landscapes always hover on the verge of the imaginary. As the artist declared:

"I’m a landscape artist, but rather than simply record the natural, I seek to use nature by taking landscapes as a visual theme within which to treat surfaces, make marks, paint colors, manipulate scale, and play shapes one on another." - Sam Richardson

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Exhibition List
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Dimensions
  • Sculpture Dimensions: 9 7/8 x 7 11/16 x 9 7/8 in. (25.08 x 19.53 x 25.08 cm)

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