In 1969, Yaacov Agam installed his 30′ square lenticular panel, Complex Vision. In 1976, it was installed on the UAB Callahan Eye Hospital, and restored in 2015.
UAB’s AEIVA mounted an exhibit, Yaacov Agam: Metamorphic with 30 of his works in 2016, the first time he’d had a one-man show in the city since the Birmingham Museum of Art had one for him in 1976, the same year the UAB work was installed, and the year he was named an Honorary Citizen of the state. There are also two Agam sculptures on the grounds of the BMA — Superline Volume (there at the entrance to the parking lot), and Touch Me (though I’m blanking on remembering where that one is installed).
In 2003, the Holocaust Memorial he designed was installed in New Orleans. It’s in Woldenberg Park right by the river, done as nine panels. When Temple Sinai’s Rabbi Cohn talked about the memorial, he said the idea was to remember the victims, not the killers. There’s a double rainbow included in the imagery.
In the Besthoff Sculpture Garden outside NOMA, there’s this Agam piece:
Last month, he received the Israel Prize for Visual Arts, for an incredible body of work. He’s elderly, so the award was brought to him at his museum in Rishon LeZion rather than him coming to Jerusalem for the honor. He said, “When I look around at my works, what I see is beyond the pieces themselves. I turn my head and see something different. Everything changes here. That’s the reality.”
That legacy is everything. As one of the great pioneers of kinetic art, he built an entire career around the idea that what we see depends entirely on where we stand and how we move. It’s perfect that his work is enjoyed at Callahan Eye Hospital, commissioned for the very patients who come there hoping to see better, in a building named for the physician who devoted his life to that same hope. xoxo