Hats in Three Stages of Landing
Hats in Three Stages of Landing
Sherwood Park,
920 North Main Street,
Salinas, California
93906
Born January 28th, 1929 in Sweeden Claes Oldenburg is an American trained sculptor. He is known for giant sized replicas of common everyday objects. His sculptures were often created with his wife, Coosje van Bruggen. Sadly, after 32 years of marriage, she passed away in 2009.
Their sculptures are found all over the world. As it turns out there are six of their sculptures in California.
Hats in Three Stages of Landing, the first art installation in California, was put in place in 1982 in Sherwood Park of Salinas California. The art installation consists of three giant cowboy style hats in the park, each supported by two poles of different heights. Each hat is about eighty feet from the next one, and the hats are approximately 9 1/2 feet by 18 feet by 15 1/2 feet. They also weigh about 2,310 pounds! The art sculpture is suppose to reflect a cowboy throwing a cowboy hat from the nearby rodeo as it falls to the ground. The brim of the hats is folded down in a way that a cowboy normally wouldn't do, but this is to evoke imagery of a horse's saddle. Holes appear in the hats in order to look more like a salad colander, since 80% of the world's lettuce comes from Salinas thus giving it the moniker the "Salad Bowl of the World".
This was the first art project that Claes Oldenburg worked together with his wife Coosje van Bruggen. But by April 2013, the hats had accumulated graffiti, homeless were sleeping under the art installation, and the paint was peeling badly. They were taken down for restoration in April of 2013 but came back on November 19th, 2013. In addition to $190,000 in costs ($45,000 of which was donated by Oldenburg himself), the restoration required a special blend of yellow for the new paint. Oldenburg had luckily kept a sample of the special blend, undisclosed all these years.
See more on Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen.
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Outside Links:
Outside References:
- Weird Hollywood (2010) by Oesterle, Joe, p: 167
First Created: 2013-11-02
Last Edited: 2014-02-18
