Brower hatcher biography

Artist biography: Brower Hatcher was born in Atlanta.
Brower Hatcher's advice to students who want to be artists is, “What's important is curiosity, adventurousness, a talent, and interest in the way things are put.
Biography.

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Linear Accelerator

About

The sculpture consists of two, 50 foot by 30 inch tapered tubular forms suspended beneath the arches of the station platform. Lit by LEDs in over 800 clear PC orbs, the sculpture is equipped with interactive capabilities, and responds to the movement of pedestrians and trains in the station with pulsing patterns and changing colors. Linear Accelerator is one of a series of living systems intended to explore the possibilities new technologies present in designing distinctly personal spaces.

Fashioned in a 3D matrix pattern of stainless steel rod, the structure itself acts as a circuit, eliminating the need for wiring to power the 5VDC LED lighting system. At the vertices of this structure are a series of clear polycarbonate orbs, each containing a circuit board with two OSRAM produced LEDs per side, a computer chip and wireless antenna. This allows each LED in the matrix to be controlled from a remote computer. In the St. Louis structure, video cameras positioned in the station provide a signal for shape sensing software, which, in turn, controls the res

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About the Art

Located at the entrance of the Environmental Health and Safety Department at Iowa State University, Crucible reflects the department’s mission to transform frequently harmful chemicals into simple, safe molecules.

The sculpture, installed in 2005, contains a symbolic flame that destroys toxic substances and in turn contributes to a healthy and safe campus. The concrete monolith, cast iron bowl, and stainless steel spatial matrix create a starstream and are a metaphor of dematerialization. Cellular matrixes are built from multi-layered and multi-colored geometric frameworks. The matrixes contain various combinations of embedded artifacts, glass, ceramics, metal and LED lighting relating to the mission, history, and influences of the Environmental Health and Safety Department. The resulting sculpture became a landmark public sculpture that enhances the sense of community and place.

About the Artist

Brower Hatcher attended Vanderbilt University School of Engineering in Nashville, TN and received a degree in Industrial Design from Pratt Instit

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Brower Hatcher and the New Paradigm

In 1973 I spent a winter as Brower Hatcher's sculpture assistant, when he was teaching at Bennington College. Today, 27 years later Brower dropped by to catch up. It seems that our ideas are more in alignment now than they were then, even though we haven't seen each other in the intervening years. It is not that our artistic ideas are so aligned, although one could find some interesting parallels in our interest in light and the desire to envelop the viewer with our artwork, but our ideas about community and how to be an artist in the world are.

We both came out of the tradition of object based art with the artist as the maestro -- remember Picasso was still alive in 1973. The way to your public was through the dealers, and in those days they served as gatekeepers determining who was in and who was out. There were two prevailing views of what art was -- what Clement Greenberg said it was and everything else. Bennington was ground zero for Greenberg's view. Both Barnett Newman and Jackson Pollock had signifi