Alexander Calder, known to many as ‘Sandy’, was an American sculptor from Pennsylvania. He was the son of well-known sculptor Alexander Stirling Calder, and his grandfather and mother were also successful artists. Alexander Calder is known for inventing wire sculptures and the mobile, a type of kinetic art which relied on careful weighting to achieve balance and suspension in the air. Calder trained as a mechanical engineer at the Stevens Institute of Technology in his early twenties and had a love for the Circus. When he moved to Paris in 1926, his interest quickly escalated into the creation of his own miniature Cirque Calder, fashioned from an array of found materials. He would pack this into two suitcases and give performances to his friends. Soon the two suitcases became five, and Calder began to make some modest earnings from the venture. As such, his career as an artist began in a very unusual way. Calder always carried wire and pliers with him so that he could “sketch” in his favorite material. This has come to be known as ‘drawing in space’ because he would literally use the wire to create a drawing in the air.

In addition to numerous hanging mobiles, he created works that cantilevered off bases that allowed the mobile element to rotate 360°, including Laocoön (1947), and works that balanced on a single point, such as Pomegranate (1949). He also produced large-scale bolted stabiles (the name given by artist Jean Arp to his stationary works), most of which exist as public art, including La Grande Vitesse (1969, Grand Rapids, Michigan) and Flamingo (1974, Federal Plaza, Chicago). Calder also exhibited a retrospective staged in the Guggenheim Museum, New York, in 1964