A preliminary message from the George Rickey Estate:

We wish to inform visitors that the Rickey home is occupied and is private property. We urge you to respect the privacy of the occupants by not trespassing on the grounds or by disturbing them.

In George Rickey's "outdoor studio" across from the house, many of the installations are in an experimental phase, and have not been "tested" or brought to public safety standards. For this reason, among others, visitors should not assume that the Rickey Estate properties are open to the public, and are expressly requested not to wander freely on the grounds.

Moreover, the Estate is not able to accommodate ANY visitors without prior arrangement.

That said, of course, anyone is welcome to view the sculptures from the public road.

An appreciation.

Almost everyone is familiar with George Rickey's glistening mobiles -- balancing themselves on every tuft of air, they whisper secrets of improbability.  Responding to the slightest breeze, they tell you nothing about the wind's direction, but, nevertheless, invite the onlooker to fixate on their serendipitously whimsical gyrations. Typically, they enter upon the stage of our consciousness in the alcoves and plazas of banks and commercial office buildings. They populate college campuses, and seem to have taken root in the sculpture gardens of museums. In these cases and in so many similar milieux, Rickey's mobiles imply that urban dwellers somehow must cancel the unavoidable effect of the massive tectonics that surround them every day. In other cases, these windblown fantasies may serve to offer relief from the stultifying weight of modern institutional life. They serve these purposes well, of course. But, in so doing, they tend to disguise their debt to nature, and specifically to the woods of rural eastern New York. Viewing the pictures presented below, we might come to realize how this bucolic environment manifest in stainless steel, by proxy is made to serve as an escape from metropolitan pressures -- a brief surrogate for distant unspoiled, untended woodlands.

In 1960 Rickey opened his studio in East Chatham, NY. East Chatham is located about 35 miles east of Troy, and of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, where he taught. Heading in the opposite direction soon brings us to the western border of Massachusetts and to the grounds of the Tanglewood Music Festival in nearby Lenox. Rickey's outdoor studio -- the woods --  just across the street from his home, over the years has become populated with multiple variants of his trademark creations.  An expert and scholar of Rickey's work (which I am not), might be able to tell you whether these pieces are the early stages of works that evolved into commercially viable objects, or whether he used the woods as an open air laboratory in which to investigate new ideas -- or both, since both ideas seem so suggest the same thing. It may also be the intended home of works he crafted for himself.

Either way, looking at the snapshots I've placed further down on the page may lead you to conclude that that his works may have been designed with the landscape in mind. Even a casual study of these images clearly demonstrates that the works respond uncannily to the natural form of the trees and to the disposition that nature has found for their location. This counterpoint -- as close to music as the visual can get -- resonates between the manmade engineering marvels placed there, and the forms that nature has written into its own creation. As such, Rickey's inventions fill the circle enveloping man and his two customary habitats. Out of mutual necessity these devices and their locales, on one hand imply all those whimsical whirligigs of the corporate garden with which everyone is familiar, while, on the other, reflect their ultimate source in the fullness and in the incalculable directions by which nature realizes its plan.

One commentator perceptively noted that Rickey has provided us with "playground equipment for the eyes." As tempting as it might be to look at these continuously varying stainless steel forms as little more than the unending formal interplay of light and shape, it seems to this commentator that their iconography speaks to the question of what kind of environment modern beings require to ensure elemental survival. Play, of course, is part of the equation.

Readers might be interested to know that I came across this hidden studio one day when visiting the nearby Shaker Museum in Old Chatham, NY.  Noticing that the museum owned a miniature version of the famous Rickey "Double L," I asked what it was doing in a Shaker museum -- of all places. "Why," said the docent, without acknowledging any exaggeration, "everybody in these parts owns a Rickey;  you can go visit his studio by walking up and down the road where he lives." Indeed, every house on his street sported a miniature Rickey on their front lawn. It was an exciting day -- like visiting the nursery to see newborns, like discovering a big secret that everyone seems to have known about but you.

Risking asking the reader to submit to an exercise in the obvious and fearful of inundating him with hopeless tedium, allow me opportunity to point out a few of the seeming correlations between Rickey's studio pieces and their placement in the woods. 1) As if built of stainless steel lumber, this piece at once reflects the bending trunk of the nearby tree and the bough that escapes to the right. 2) Reaching high like the twin trees to its right, one wonders whether this work (at least as photographed) also mimics a TV antenna for this house at left. 3) While miming the horizontal hedge behind it, forking verticals parody the diverging trees to their right. 4) New sprouts and expanding limbs in these two works. 5) It may be difficult to see in this photograph, but the work shown occupies a small clearing and seems to have just landed there. 6) See #4. 7) One wonders whether the rectangular plates of this work reflect their proximity to the work-house nearby. 8) One of the two works in this image is studying to be just like the big tree behind it. It may be a stretch; but, that is exactly what it appears to be doing. 9) Most of us like our cubes to be on the ground; but, this one wants to take up the airspace of the clearing it inhabits. In nature, cubes needn't march to the surveyor's rule. 10) Four "Ls" in stainless copy the stand of trees at the right. 11) Interlocking stars stand at the entry to a small clearing, an emblem, as it were, indicating through its own openness, that an open space follows. 12) Spreading horizontally over the pond and turning on a vertical axis, like Narcissus, this work spends eternity turning this way and turning that way, but always looking at itself. It looks at the placid waters and is the placid waters -- object and subject at once. It has become its own reflection. 14) I'm told that this Is Rickey's house.

One morning in 1985 or 1986, the Rickey sculpture that stood on the Princeton campus was discovered to have been vandalized. Destruction of a work of art is not to be condoned, of course; but I thought it significant that, ostensibly, several students tried to climb it. Even in New Jersey, it seems, something can be as beautiful as a tree.