16/07/2025
We are sad to share that Nancy Mulnix Tweddale passed away last week. Art critic and Calder biographer Jed Perl shares some words about his friend:
“I have a new fancy, named Nancy.” That’s how Calder inscribed a book to Nancy (Mulnix) Tweddale in 1967, two years before her campaign to bring monumental abstract sculpture to the Midwest resulted in the installation of La Grande vitesse in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Nancy died on July 9; she was 85. It’s easy to forget the controversies a public commission for an enormous abstract sculpture could inspire sixty years ago. Nancy, who’d admired Calder’s art since she was a child, had the connections, energy, and vision to make something new happen in what was by many measures a conservative city. Calder responded to her charm and determination. When La Grande vitesse was being installed he counted on her to get things right. “You tell ‘em, Nancy,” he wrote to this woman who made a place for Calder’s radical art in the American heartland.
For more information: https://tinyurl.com/bdd56x8s
[Image: La Grande vitesse (1969), Grand Rapids, Michigan. © 2025 Calder Foundation, New York / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York]
