NARRATOR:

You’re standing with Alexander Calder’s Big Crinkly, a painted metal sculpture from 1969. This is a large abstract form made of steel plates bolted together. It’s painted in black, white, and the primary colors red, yellow, and blue, with an animated top that moves in the wind. It stands 12 ½ feet high and is over 8 feet wide and 6 feet deep. This is a three-legged structure about the size of a small giraffe. If we imagine it as a creature, the sculpture seems to be made up of two distinct parts. The lower portion is a grounded, unmoving, static structure with two legs and a zigzag tail holding it in place. The body and legs are painted a bright red color. The zigzag tail has six distinct triangular sections. Each plane of the crinkled tail has been painted either yellow, red, black or white. At the base of the body, there are clusters of bolts. The body cranes toward the sky, and ends in a sharp point. The neck appears to be smooth, but the lower half of the body is bumpy, full of planes and angles. In the upper portion of the sculpture, a thin slightly curved rod balances horizontally on the point of the neck, and extends away from the body. If a gust of wind came along, the metal rod would spin gently in the breeze. At each end of the rod, abstract forms hang in balance. At one end, a single form has been painted blue. At the opposite end, a vertical bar intersects with the horizontal rod. Steel forms hang at each end of that vertical bar—one is painted black, the other, white. Despite it being a 12 and a half foot tall steel structure, the sculpture has friendly, playful quality.