Landmarks, the University of Texas public art program, has announced that it will unveil a new commission this fall by artist Sarah Oppenheimer.
The work, titled “C-010106,” will be installed on a footbridge between the Gary Thomas Energy Building and the Engineering Education and Research Center, two new buildings of the Cockrell School of Engineering designed by the New York-based firm Ennead Architects with Jacobs.
“We’re working with an inventor who questions everything,” said Andrée Bober Landmarks founding director and curator. “Oppenheimer draws scientists and engineers into a journey that is driven by curiosity. I can’t think of a more apt place for this work than the center of innovation and discovery at the Cockrell School of Engineering.”
“C-010106” will have two parallel planes of glass visible from the footbridge and from below it. Sandwiched within each plane of glass, another pair of reflective diagonal planes of glass are positioned to the face the sky and the ground to create intimate and unexpected views between the footbridge occupants and the pathway beneath.
Oppenheimer, who was born in Austin in 1972 and is based in New York, has declined to make renderings of the project public. “C-010106” will be unveiled this fall and was recently announced as the recipient of a $20,000 NEA grant.
A recipient of the Rome Prize Fellowship, Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Fellowship, and a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, Oppenheimer is currently a senior critic at the Yale University School of Art. Later this year the Ruth and Elmer Wellin Museum of Art at Hamilton College will open the solo exhibition “Sarah Oppenheimer: Sensitive Machine.”
“C-010106 is a catalyst: it reconfigures social patterns emerging within the flux of public place,” said Oppenheimer. “I am eager to see the piece animated by intimate exchanges passing through and around its contours.”
