Public Art at Williams

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This welded steel sculpture by American abstract sculptor Arline Shulman was part of the large bequest of art made to Williams by renowned art collector and alumnus Lawrence Bloedel. Shulman’s outdoor sculptures can be found near several public buildings and plazas in New York from Albany to Binghamton to the Bronx.

Counterpoint consists of seven counterbalanced shapes: a cube; a circle; a flat, ring-shaped form; two long rectangular boxes; and two u-shaped troughs. Sitting on a bed of gravel, the weight of the sculpture rests primarily on the tilted cube and the flat ring.

Bloedel purchased the work after having seen it on display at Tanglewood. It was originally bright red and purple, having been painted with an autobody spray gun. Shulman remarked, “I thought of phases of music and I was listening to Mozart when I made it (Counterpoint) . . . a kind of unity from a classical composition.”

The sculpture is one of several works from Bloedel’s collection that reside outside of the main campus at Field Farm.

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