Long-lost Bertoia Sculpture Is Installed in GM’s Global Headquarters

Last December, after extensive restoration, the 1970 masterpiece by sculptor and designer Harry Bertoia (1915-1978) was installed in the atrium of General Motors’ new world headquarters in Detroit, Michigan. General Motors announced the news in December, detroit free press The sculpture was reported this month.

In 1970, the JL Hudson Company, an anchor store at the Genesee Valley Mall in Flint, Michigan, commissioned Bertoia (best known for Knoll-designed furniture and later public sculptures) to create an artwork for the mall’s open-air courtyard. The 26-foot-tall hanging sculpture is composed of two cloud-like brazed steel rods, a technique Bertoia calls “sunlit straw,” suspended one beneath the other.

The Genesee Valley Mall closed for renovations in 1980, and Bertoia moved to the Northland Mall in Southfield, Michigan. It was never put on public display and the Northland Mall closed in 2015. Six years later, the mall was demolished.

In 2017, evaluators from the Southfield Arts Council discovered the sculpture, now badly damaged and covered in dust, in the basement of an abandoned shopping mall. The city of Southfield subsequently purchased it and began repairs.

The choice to display this piece at GM’s Hudson headquarters in Detroit seems appropriate. After arriving in the United States from Italy, Bertoia first settled in the city, where he attended art school at the Detroit Arts and Crafts Society and then at the prestigious Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, a suburb of Detroit.

Bertoia also has ties to General Motors. His first public sculpture, a wall partition composed of brazed steel panels, was commissioned in 1953 for General Motors’ Eero Saarinen-designed Technical Center in Warren, Michigan, and is still on display today.

The artist’s daughter Celia Bertoia, who now runs a foundation dedicated to his work, told the outlet detroit free press”, “The Harry Bertoia Foundation is very pleased to see [the sculpture] Once again in the public eye, everyone can enjoy it. “