Flame of the Millennium, 2002
Leonardo Nierman
Kennedy Expressway at the
Ohio Street Interchange
This 25-foot high stainless steel sculpture suggests a
flame blown by the wind and it is an appropriately dynamic piece for its chosen
location next to a busy expressway. It was a gift from Mexico City as part of
the International Sculpture Exchange Program, which was established by the city
of Chicago to help enhance its “gateways” by installing works of public art
from Chicago’s international sister cities.
Leonardo Nierman was born in 1932 in Mexico City to
immigrant parents from Lithuania and Ukraine, regions that are well represented
in the population of the city of Chicago. Nierman is part of a generation of
Mexican artists who have moved away from the influence of Mexican Muralists
such as Diego Rivera and José Clemente Orozco, in the direction of more
abstract works that respond to formalist tendencies in Modernism.
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