Here at the Walker, as associate registrar Joe King is preparing to restore the brilliant red paint on Spoonbridge’s crowning touch, we received the sad news that one of its co-creators has died. In addition to writing scholarly pieces on artists like John Baldessari and Gerhard Richter, Coosje van Bruggen worked with her husband Claes Oldenburg on a number of sculptures that basically monumentalized Pop art, a body of work she dubbed “The Large-Scale Projects.”
The outsized objects, which date back to the late 70s, range from a baseball bat in Chicago to binoculars in Venice, California, to a broom and dustpan in Denver; Spoonbridge and Cherry (1985-88), a highlight of the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden, is special in that it was the duo’s first fountain sculpture. Van Bruggen, who succumbed to breast cancer at her home in Los Angeles over the weekend, is being memorialized by dozens of obituaries online, including Time and the L.A. Times, which has a fine slideshow as well, featuring the work that has become a Minneapolis landmark.