Charles O. Perry ~ Sculptor, Architect, Designer & Lecturer ~ His Artworks Known Worldwide, Dies at 81

Written by Taylor Washington Tuesday, 19 July 2011 22:11

New York (New York Times). - Charles O. Perry, a sculptor who created dozens of mathematically inspired works for plazas and sculpture gardens throughout the United States and abroad and created "Continuum," the knotted black Moebius strip that stands in front of the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum in Washington, died on Tuesday 8^th February 2011 at his home in Norwalk, Connecticut, he was 81. Mr. Perry was an architect working for Skidmore, Owings & Merrill in San Francisco when he began making sculptural models at night in his garage. In 1964 his works were exhibited in a one-man show at the Hansen Gallery that sold out and earned him a commission from the city of Fresno.

That year he also won the Prix de Rome, an award that sent him to study sculpture at the American Academy in Rome, where he stayed for the next 14 years to practice architecture and make large-scale works of sculpture that drew inspiration from the geometry inherent in natural forms.

"Continuum," completed in 1976 for the new Air and Space Museum, is a bit of topological whimsy that plays with the peculiarities of the Moebius strip, which has one continuous surface and one edge. "In this case, the edge of the sculpture portrays the path of a star as it flows through the center of the sculpture's 'black hole' into negative space-time and on again into positive space," Mr. Perry told Ivars Peterson for the book "Fragments of Infinity: A Kaleidoscope of Math and Art" (2001).

In recent years, Perry has also diversified into developing chair designs, jewelry, and a number of sculptural puzzles for the Museum of Modern Art and the Smithsonian Institution

Charles Owen Perry was born on Oct. 18, 1929, in Helena, Montana, where his father owned a successful gold and gem mine. He served in the Army as a forward observer with an artillery unit in Korea, where he was awarded a bronze star for bravery and also created his own gun sight from scrap parts. After returning to the United States, he enrolled in the School of Art and Architecture at Yale, earning a master's degree in architecture in 1958. At the suggestion of the painter Josef Albers, he experimented with a variety of materials in a quest to discover their inner nature. In so doing, he became interested in the rhombus and invented plastic rhombic hexahedrons that interlocked to form novel shapes. These were later exhibited as art at the 1969 Spoleto Festival in Italy and, under the name ‘Perrygons’, sold as construction toys through the Museum of Modern Art.