Tom Shannon (artist)
| Tom Shannon | |
|---|---|
Shannon, The Highline, 2012
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| Born |
June 23, 1947 Kenosha, Wisconsin, U.S. |
| Education |
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| Known for | Sculpture, painting, or drawing things that levitate or float |
| Notable work |
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| Movement | Conceptualism, Minimalism, Installation Art |
| Website | tomshannon |
Tom Shannon (born June 23, 1947), is an American artist and inventor.
Shannon was born in Kenosha, Wisconsin to parents John Kingsley Shannon, a Marine pilot and inventor, and Audrey Elizabeth Shannon. He has two brothers, John and James. Shannon attended the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. He received his MFA in 1971 from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. On September 26, 1990 Shannon married Catherine Matisse Monnier, a great granddaughter of Henri Matisse and granddaughter of Marcel Duchamp. Shannon and his family live in New York City.
Shannon's work incorporates scientific themes. Shannon built Squat, an interactive robotic sculpture at his father's battery manufacturing plant in the summer of 1966. Squat won the Pauline Palmer Prize at the Chicago Art Institute that year in a show juried by James Speyer and Walter Hopps.
Squat, made at 19 years old, was included in the landmark exhibition The Machine as Seen at the End of the Mechanical Age at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1969. It is considered a seminal work in robotic art.
In 1981, the first of Shannon's large magnetically levitated sculptures, the seven-meter long Compass of Love, was exhibited in New York, then purchased by the Musee d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. The system of permanent magnets employed was designed by Shannon.
In 1983, Shannon patented and produced an edition of 20 World Clocks with the participation of Fuller and Sadao's cartography. An example is in the collection of the Buckminster Fuller Institute and the Smithsonian American History Museum.
Pontus Hulten, through the French Ministry of Culture, commissioned Shannon to make a major work for La Villette. Shannon designed a 17-meter diameter spherical array of computer-controlled RGB LED nodes equidistantly spaced like atoms in a crystal, called The Crystal Ball. . In 1991, the Moderna Museet in Stockholm purchased Shannon's first room-sized magnetic array, Compass Moon Atom Room.
In 2000, Shannon commissioned Aerovironment to perform a feasibility study for Air Genie Video Airship. A US Patent was granted 2003. Shannon was commissioned by the Grande Palais in Paris to make a movie of his Airlands project (aka Outlands) for a major millennial show covering ten thousand years of Visions of the Future.
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