Artwork Details
- Title
- Bridge
- Artist
- Date
- 2013-2014
- Location
- Dimensions
- dimensions variable
- Copyright
- © 2013-2014, Glenn Kaino
- Credit Line
- Gift of the Smithsonian Secretary and the Smithsonian National Board and museum purchase through the Luisita L. and Franz H. Denghausen Endowment
- Mediums
- Mediums Description
- fiberglass, steel, wire and gold paint
- Classifications
- Subjects
- Architecture — bridge
- Figure — fragment — arm
- Object Number
- 2022.34A-C
Artwork Description
Look overhead and you will see an aerial sculpture comprised of two hundred golden arms hanging from the ceiling. Each is a casting of the outstretched right arm of Tommie Smith (b. 1944), the American winner of the men's 200-meter race at the 1968 Olympic Games in Mexico City.
During the medal ceremony, Smith bowed his head and raised his black-gloved fist in an act of protest. Coming at a moment of turmoil in the United States, where unrest flared over the war in Vietnam and racial inequality, his gesture was an assertion of Black solidarity in the fight for human rights. Echoed by the American bronze medalist John Carlos, it inspired social causes around the world and irrevocably changed Smith's own life.
Glenn Kaino, a Los Angeles--based conceptual artist, created Bridge as part of an ongoing collaboration with Smith and as a reflection on the power of the athlete's gesture nearly fifty years after it occurred. Nearly one hundred feet long, the sculpture reaches both backward and forward, acting as bridge through time and space into the present. It serves as a monument to one person's action and its aftermath, evoking the ways that even small acts can ripple through time and alter the course of history.
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