Rumi (1991) by Mark di Suvero — a 24-foot painted-steel I-beam construction in the Donald J. Hall Sculpture Park at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art; gifted to the museum by the Hall Family Foundation in 1999.
The work
Rumi (1991) is a painted-steel sculpture composed of welded I-beams. It stands 24 feet tall (approximately 7.3 m) and measures roughly 8 feet 9 inches deep by 7 feet wide, weighing approximately four tons. The I-beams are painted orange — a color di Suvero chose in direct reference to the Golden Gate Bridge, the first landmark he saw when his family arrived in San Francisco as immigrants in 1941.
The title honors the 13th-century Persian poet Jalal al-Din Rumi, whose writings gave rise to Sufism. Di Suvero conceived the form as an embodiment of the sema, the whirling meditative dance practiced by Sufi dervishes: the outward-thrusting steel arms suggest a figure mid-rotation, suspended between weight and motion.
Before entering the Nelson-Atkins collection, Rumi traveled through several major American venues: it was first exhibited at Socrates Sculpture Park in Long Island City, New York (April 1991 – April 1992), then at the Doris C. Freedman Plaza in Central Park, New York (December 1993 – August 1994), and subsequently outside the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice (June – October 1995).
Mark di Suvero
Mark di Suvero (born Marco Polo Levi di Suvero, September 18, 1933, Shanghai, China) is an American sculptor widely regarded as one of the central figures in postwar American abstract sculpture. He was born in Shanghai to Italian-Jewish parents — his father served as a naval attaché — and the family immigrated to San Francisco in February 1941. He earned a B.A. in Philosophy from UC Berkeley in 1956 and relocated to New York City, where he became embedded in the Abstract Expressionist milieu. His first solo exhibition, at the Green Gallery in Manhattan in 1960, established him as a sculptor of unusual ambition.
Di Suvero’s practice is built around large-scale steel construction. His signature material is the standard structural I-beam, which he cuts, torques, and welds into open, dynamic compositions — often at monumental scale, frequently painted in saturated industrial colors. He pioneered the use of the crane as a sculptor’s primary working tool, a move that shifted the entire scale of possibility for outdoor sculpture. Many of his works incorporate kinetic elements, with hanging or pivoting components that respond to wind and touch.
His work draws simultaneously on Abstract Expressionist gesture (translated into three dimensions) and the formal language of Russian Constructivism. He founded the Athena Foundation in 1977 to support artists, and in 1986 co-founded Socrates Sculpture Park in Long Island City — a free outdoor sculpture venue built on a former illegal dump site. Di Suvero received the National Medal of Arts in 2010. His studio organization, Spacetime C.C., manages his public commissions and archive.
Major works are held at Storm King Art Center (Mountainville, New York), the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden (Washington, D.C.), and the Pulitzer Arts Foundation (St. Louis), among many others.
At the Nelson-Atkins
Rumi was acquired by the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in 1999 as a gift from the Hall Family Foundation (accession number F99-33/5). It is installed in the Donald J. Hall Sculpture Park, the free-admission outdoor sculpture grounds that extend across the museum’s east lawn at 4525 Oak Street.
The sculpture occupies an open section of the park where its vertical scale and horizontal reach can be read from a distance. Its orange finish places it in deliberate visual conversation with the lawn’s grassy ground plane and the limestone Beaux-Arts museum building behind it.
Rumi sits within a collection that includes Shuttlecocks (Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen, 1994), multiple Henry Moore bronzes, and George Segal’s Rush Hour — together one of the stronger concentrations of twentieth-century outdoor sculpture in the American Midwest.
See also
nelson-atkins · donald-j-hall-sculpture-park · shuttlecocks-nelson-atkins · henry-moore-at-nelson-atkins · george-segal-rush-hour · The KS.City Wiki