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Outdoor Sculpture: Obelisk

September 11, 2008 - August 16, 2009

Museum: American Indian Museum

Location: Outside main entrance

Obelisk (1987, ed. 2/6) is a 15 1/2 foot-tall, 1,500-pound, cast-bronze sculpture by renowned Native American artist Fritz Scholder (1937-2005; Luiseno). Scholder's obelisk was inspired by his long fascination with all things Egyptian. After an unsuccessful attempt to acquire an ancient obelisk in Egypt in the 1970s, Scholder decided to create his own. He and his former wife, Romona, asked a street vendor to translate their names into hieroglyphics. Those glyphs appear on the sculpture, along with others that Scholder invented.

See related exhibition Fritz Scholder: Indian/Not Indian On loan from the Collection of New Mexico Museum of Art in Santa Fe, New Mexico.