Mark di Suvero

Marco Polo di Suvero, better known as Mark di Suvero, is an abstract expressionist sculptor and 2010 National Medal of Arts recipient.

After graduating from college, di Suvero moved to New York City in 1957 to begin a career as a sculptor. He worked part-time in construction and began to incorporate wood and metal from demolition sites into his work.

Di Suvero gained recognition among art critics with his first solo exhibit at the Green Gallery in Manhattan in the fall of 1960. The editor of Arts Magazine wrote, "From now on nothing will be the same. One felt this at di Suvero's show. Here was a body of work at once so ambitious and intelligent, so raw and clean, so noble and accessible, that it must permanently alter our standards of artistic effort."

On March 26, 1960, while working at a construction site, he was involved in a near-fatal elevator accident, resulting in a broken back and severe spinal injuries. Treating physicians initially believed he would be unable to walk again. While in rehabilitation, however, he learned to work with an arc welder, which he used in later pieces. His recovery took four years. By 1965, he was able to walk without assistance. He is one of the 16 artists featured in Chronicles of Courage: Very Special Artists, a book that featured the accident and the subsequent effect it had on his health.

Di Suvero was a founding member of the Park Place Gallery in 1963 with Forrest Myers, Leo Valledor, Peter Forakis, and others. The gallery closed in July 1967.

Di Suvero protested the Vietnam War, and was arrested twice. He left the United States in 1971. During his four-year self-exile, he exhibited his works in the Netherlands and Germany, taught at the Università Internazionale dell'Arte, and lived in Chalon-sur-Saône, France where he maintained one of his studios on a barge until 1989. His French barge, Rêve de signes, has since been turned into La Vie des Formes, an atelier for emerging artists, which has been moored at Montceau-les-Mines since 2009.

In 1975, his sculptures were exhibited in the Tuileries Garden in Paris, the first living artist to hold an exhibition there. He later returned to the United States and opened a studio in Petaluma, California in 1975. While the Petaluma studio is still active, di Suvero moved to New York City and opened a studio there.

In 1976, the Whitney Museum of American Art in Manhattan housed a retrospective exhibition of di Suvero's smaller structures, while the city of New York exhibited some of his larger sculptures all around town. His 1966 sculpture, Praise for Elohim Adonai, was erected in front of the Seagram Building. In January 2024, the work was permanently installed adjacent to David Chipperfield's East Building for the Saint Louis Art Museum.

He founded the Athena Foundation in 1977 and Socrates Sculpture Park in 1986, both of which function to assist artists. In 2019, his tallest piece, E=MC 2, was moved from France to the Storm King Art Center in upstate New York.

Text courtesy of Wikipedia, 2024