Carl Floyd, Sculptor, born 1936

1989 VISUAL ARTS

Carl Floyd is known mostly for his environmentally appropriate outdoor sculptures that are meant to be used and admired by the general public.  His works appear architectonic and dominate as only architecture can.  This is not surprising for an artist who was trained in engineering and architecture.  Born in Somerset, Kentucky, Floyd studied architecture at Utah State University from 1959-1961 and at the University of California at Berkeley. He earned a BFA from Kansas State University in 1964 and an MFA from Cranbrook Academy in 1967.  From his student days onward he exhibited in various parts of the country and had his first one-man show in 1970.  He taught at the University of the Kentucky College of Architecture before coming to Cleveland in 1971 to teach in the sculpture department of the Cleveland Institute of Art.  Floyd became chairman of the department in 1985 and retired from the Institute in 1998.  He has lived in Alabama since 2002.

Carl Floyd’s sculpture of the 1960s and 1970s were often influenced by the strong, masculine forms of the machine.  Although not working machines themselves, in their juxtaposition of cylinders, wheels, hooks, and blocks they exert the feeling of  a working, precision instrument. Large outdoor sculptures, like Black Environment, have giant interlocking jigsaw forms pulled apart like open doors. Machines and their parts always fascinated Floyd and he kept a collection of machine parts that influenced him in his sculptural pursuits.  Also, in these works the hand of the maker was always hidden beneath the beauty of the polished stone or metal.  A few of his first outdoor sculpture pieces for parks and his proposals for outdoor environments suggest the unsettling feel of gun encampments.

In Cleveland, Carl Floyd enlarged his repertoire of site sculpture with numerous commissions in various neighborhood parks. He often incorporated tile work by children to be set on massive stone monoliths.  These works reflect the brutalism so prevalent in architecture of the 1970s. Floyd’s large outdoor sculptures from the 1970s and 1980s are multi-pieced, to be walked through and around and to encompass a large environment, giving room for outdoor activities. Concomitant with these heavy, substantial outdoor pieces are his environmentally conscious works that incorporate sculpture into the landscape.  In some of his drawings and proposals, simplified trees in cut-out form abound and proliferate. In an impressive installation at the Cleveland Museum of Art from 1991, Floyd’s favorite work, his white ghostly forest is stark in its purity and fragility.  Here he demonstrated his continued interest in saving the environment from the ravenous consumerism of mankind.  Some of his most recent work, still focused on ecology, is massive in scale, weighing half a ton and extending over 50 or 100 acres.  

In breaking with past classical tradition, Carl Floyd has noted Rodin and Le Corbusier  as major influences, but unlike his predecessors, his interest goes beyond the sculptural and architectural. Always an issue-oriented artist, Floyd seeks to focus awareness on the vulnerability of the environment in the modern world.

— By Diane De Grazia
Winter 2008

All photos courtesy of the artist.