Local residents will see stars when they enter the new Morgan
Hill Library opening July 21 on Main Avenue.
Santa Cruz artist’s hanging sculpture reflects night sky
n By Tony Burchyns Staff Writer
Morgan Hill – Local residents will see stars when they enter the new Morgan Hill Library opening July 21 on Main Avenue.
That’s because Santa Cruz artist David Kimball Anderson’s hanging sculpture “Leaves and Stars” will greet them in the lobby.
“If you’re looking up at it, you’ll see a ring of stars, a ring of leaves and another ring of stars,” said Anderson, 61, in a phone interview Wednesday afternoon. “It’s built as though the stars are rotating and the leaves are blowing in the wind.”
Technically a mobile by design – though little breeze is expected inside the $19-million library to turn it – “Leaves and Stars” measures eight feet in diameter and six feet in height. It will hang 12 to 14 feet above the floor after it is installed July 5.
Anderson teaches art at San Jose State University. He is one of six artists commissioned by the Friends of the Morgan Hill Library group to create original art for the new library. The group has raised more than $180,000 in the past year for art and library equipment. They commissioned Anderson’s piece for $25,000.
In addition to the hanging sculpture, Anderson is also fashioning a bronze tree with a poppy jasper base that will display the names of more than 70 individuals, businesses and organizations who donated to the Friends of the Morgan Hill Library’s Beyond Books Campaign.
Anderson’s lengthy resume includes public collections and commissions at 12 museums in California, Texas, New Mexico, Nebraska and Washington, D.C. His work is shown at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the National Endowment for the Arts in Washington, D.C. He’s won nine grants and fellowships since 1973.
He learned metallurgy and fabrication during his childhood in Los Angeles and began making art in earnest in 1963 at Scripps College in Southern California. Well-known American painter Richard Diebenkorn’s grandmother, Nellie Fryer, provided the top floor of her barn as a studio, according to Anderson’s Web site.
From 1965 to 1967, he served in the U.S. Navy on a small oiler refueling mine sweepers off the coast of Vietnam. He later attended the San Francisco Art Institute, graduating in 1971. He won the first of three National Endowment for the Arts fellowships in 1974.
Anderson moved from Berkeley to New Mexico in 1980 and then to Santa Cruz in 1997, at which point he canceled all shows for three years to work without deadlines. He started teaching at San Jose State, and resumed exhibition work in 2001.
