Campus Gems: Homage to Georgia O’Keefe

As you make your sprint from the Wawa on Spruce to your 9 a.m. class on Locust, cutting through that little courtyard behind McNeil becomes more of a desperate coffee–juggling act than a scenic detour. Believe it or not, a small sculptural piece titled “Homage to Georgia O’Keefe” by Thom Kooney Crawford has been a witness to your acrobatics every morning. Though cast in bronze, the sculpture barely dissociates itself from the foliage, depicting a female silhouette that imitates the slender trunk of a young tree. Her left arm crosses her chest, and a serpent winds its away around the base of her form. Like Crawford’s other works, “Homage to Georgia O’Keefe” plays with negative space in its delicate contours and creates a dialogue with the natural environment within which it is presented. As for the “Homage,” Georgia O’Keefe is best known for her large–scale oil paintings of flowers that resemble the female form. That’s right—vaginas. It seems that in a similar fashion, Crawford emblematizes the original female, a biblical Eve entwined by a serpent, by rooting her in nature, both literally and aesthetically.