WP3: historical context

My particular piece of art of built in 1995. The sculpture was designed by American Tom Otterness. He was born in 1952 in Wichita, Kansas and now lives and works in New York. He has a well-known reputation for figurative art. Otterness has played an important role in reintroducing narrative and figurative sculpture as a vital art form. He has art published all over the world from Nebraska all the way to Madrid Spain. Some of it in indoors while others is in parks, plazas, subway stations, libraries, courthouses and of course museums. His sculptures are filled with multiple meanings and allude to sex, class, money and race.

According to his biography on his website his sculptures depict, among other things, huge pennies, pudgy characters in business suits with moneybag heads, helmeted workers holding giant tools, and an alligator crawling out from under a sewer cover. The main theme of his work seems to be the struggle of the little man against the capitalist machine in a difficult and strange city. His aesthetic can be seen as a riff on capitalist realism and blends high and low, cute and cutting. On his website he gives specific instructions on how he thinks of his ideas. He writes everything down and goes from there. Here are the steps he takes: first is the idea, then the drawing on paper, then the wire armature, after that he makes a clay model, hires the foundry, polich art work, makes the rubber model, then the wax model, the gated wax, then the ceramic shell, the ceramic shell full of metal, rough casting, finishing the bronze, and finally the patina (coloring of the bronze). There are a lot of steps in the processes of making an art object.

I looked through pictures of some of his other pieces of art work which can be found on his website. Most all of his sculptures are made out of bronze material and mostly of people. He was the first artist in 2005 to make a humpty dumpty balloon in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade. He also made a really cool playground set out of bronze that is life-size and children can actually play on it.

He was at one time in his life a guard at the American Museum of Natural History in New York; he was impressed with the giant Olmec heads created by ancient Central American cultures. Fallen Dreamer has also been seen as a statement on “the fragility of today’s icons and heroes.” Tom is known to make more than one of the same sculpture. There are three different Fallen Dreamers.



The Olmec were an ancient Pre-Columbian civilization living in the tropical lowlands of south-central Mexico. They dated roughly back to 1400 BCE to about 400 BCE. They were the first Mesoamerican civilization and laid many of the foundations to follow. The most familiar aspect of the Olmecs is their artwork, particularly the aptly-named colossal heads. In fact, the Olmec civilization was first defined through artifacts purchased on the pre-Columbian art market in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Olmec artworks are considered among ancient America's most striking and beautiful, and among the world's masterpieces.


work cited.

Olmec. Web. 30 Nov. 2009. .

Sculpture Brochure. Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery and Sculpture Garden, n.d. Web. 24 Nov. 2009. http://www.sheldonartgallery.org/photos/graphics/sculpturebrochure.pdf.

Tom Otterness. Artnet. Web. 30 Nov. 2009. .

Tom Otterness. 29 Nov. 2009. Web. .

Tom Otterness. Web. 30 Nov. 2009. .