Glenn Kaino: Bridge
On View July 26

Smithsonian American Art Museum
8th and G Streets, NW
 

Experience a historic moment from the Olympic Games with Glenn Kaino’s powerful aerial sculpture Bridge, opening Friday, July 26, in the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s Luce Foundation Center. Bridge is comprised of two hundred golden arms hanging from the ceiling. Each is a casting of the outstretched right arm of Tommie Smith, the American winner of the men’s 200-meter race at the 1968 Olympic Games in Mexico City. During the medal ceremony, Smith bowed his head and raised his black-gloved fist in a symbolic act of protest. Coming at a moment of turmoil in the United States, his gesture was an assertion of Black solidarity in the fight for human rights.

Glenn Kaino created Bridge (2013-2014) as part of an ongoing collaboration with Smith and as a reflection on the power of the athlete’s gesture almost fifty years after it occurred. Nearly 100 feet long, the sculpture reaches both backward and forward, acting as bridge through time and space into the present. It serves as a monument to one person’s action and its aftermath, evoking the ways that even small acts can ripple through time and alter the course of history.