Skip to main content
Washington University in St. Louis
Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts

Create an account to add artworks to your personal collections.

Enter your email address below to recieve an email to reset your password.

An email has been sent to your inbox to reset your password.

image alt

Dan Peterman

Accessories to an Event

2006

image alt
1 / 1

Feel free to touch or sit on this geometrically shaped sculpture by the Chicago-based artist Dan Peterman. In this work, titled Accessories to an Event, Peterman uses reprocessed, postconsumer plastic and stainless steel hardware. The artist has been working in this style, known as “adaptive reuse,” for many years. Specially commissioned for the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum’s Florence Steinberg Weil Sculpture Garden, Peterman’s work exists in an intermediary position between art object and furniture designed for public use. In addition to blurring the boundary between art and design, his sculpture can be read as a form of political commentary concerning the exhaustion of goods and resources in late-capitalist society. Accessories to an Event is made up of six combinations of rectangular forms, colored a shade of gray that approximates the concrete plaza on which is it sits. Its simplified form recalls Minimalist art of the 1960s, which consisted of single or repeated geometric forms industrially produced or built by skilled workers following an artist’s instructions. In Peterman’s rational composition, each unit is paired: there are two structures in the center, two flanking the center, and two on the ends, each appearing as an inversion of the other. The stark, judicious approach of Minimalism is evoked in this work but is notably altered by the artist’s driving interest in environmental activism and the reuse of material waste. [Cell phone tour, 2020]

  • Artist Dan Peterman (American, b. 1960)
  • Title Accessories to an Event
  • Date 2006
  • Medium Postconsumer reprocessed plastics and stainless steel hardware
  • Credit line University purchase, Bixby Fund, and with funds from the Weil Family, 2006
  • Object number WU 2006.0004

6/15/2006
Martin Klosterfelde, Berlin

This artwork record may be incomplete or need refinement. Our staff actively researches the collection and revises records when new information is available. If you have questions or comments about this record, please contact us.

Related Content

go to Activism and Protest page
2021_0004.tif
Theme

Activism and Protest

go to Sustainability and Environment page
2003_0016.tif
Theme

Sustainability and Environment

Image Reproduction Request Form

To request image materials and/or permission to reproduce a work of art from the Museum's collection, please complete and submit the form below. The information you provide here will enable us to process your request and assess the appropriate images, permissions, and any applicable fees. 

Typically, image requests that do not require new photography can be completed within three weeks. Whenever possible, rush orders may be accommodated, although additional fees may apply.

If you have questions, please contact Kristin Good, associate registrar, at kristin.good@wustl.edu.

Checking this box constitutes a legal signature. By checking this box, the applicant agrees to abide by all terms and conditions under which permission is granted to reproduce works of art in the collection of the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, and that permission is contingent upon payment of any applicable fees.

* Required fields

test View details