Untitled+No.+192

Date: 1989
 * [[image:http://ids.si.edu/ids/deliveryService?id=http://americanart.si.edu/images/1993/1993.27_1a.jpg&max=460 width="285" height="365" link="@http://americanart.si.edu/collections/search/artwork/?id=33596"]] || Title: **Untitled #192**

Artist: **John McQueen** Born: Oakland, Illinois 1943

Medium: burdock burrs and applewood Dimensions: 22 1/4 x 18 x 20 3/4 in. (56.6 x 45.8 x 52.8 cm) Smithsonian American Art Museum Gift of the James Renwick Alliance © 1989, John McQueen

1993.27 || "My baskets still have the tree in them, the bark, the bug marks---all those things that show they were alive." John McQueen
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The materials and design of //Untitled #192// express nature's tenacious power. Burdock is a particularly stubborn weed that grows in the cleared fields of the northeast. Every autumn, John McQueen goes out into the fields and builds his pieces where the burdock grows, partly because the burrs cannot be stored, but also because the artist wants to emphasize the intimate connections between nature and art. The bristly sphere of seed-bearing burrs swells with energy while a trimmed twig of applewood seems to have erupted from within. The result is an object that resembles a sprouted seedpod or the globe of the earth itself, with one symbolic tree rising from it.
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SAAM Collections Page Artist Biography
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