A Kinetic Sculptor

This article highlights different mechanical engineering works of Arthur Ganson. The fundamentals of mechanical engineering inform every piece of Arthur Ganson’s moving sculptures. Ganson, who is as much an engineer as he is an artist, works with unpolished steel, found objects, homemade gears, and roughly soldered wires. Yet he assembles them with such care that their movements create an elegant and mesmerizing beauty. His permanent installations tick, whiz, and hum at the National Inventors Hall of Fame in Ohio and at the Smithsonian Institution’s Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation. His work has been featured at numerous museums and galleries around the world, and he has even appeared in ‘Muffy’s Art Attack,’ an episode of the children’s cartoon Arthur. While most engineers spend their careers hiding the pieces that make their machines move, Ganson reveals his. To construct each sculpture and engineer its movement, he relies on the fundamentals of mechanical engineering and physics the same way that a painter uses color theory as a guide for creating a visual effect.