Carl Milles sculpture installed
This summer the College installed a group of five sculptures depicting angels playing musical instruments. Balanced on columns arranged in a loose circle near Rosse Hall, home of Kenyon's music department, Milles's angels rise against the sky, seeming to dance as they play.
The grouping, suggestive of ceremony and myth, offers a fine example of work by a sculptor who gained international recognition while becoming a hero in his homeland. Milles (1875-1955) worked in Sweden, Paris, and elsewhere in Europe before coming to the United States, where for twenty years he was the resident sculptor at the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hill, Michigan. The gardens there feature several of his fountains, while other works form the centerpieces of parks and plazas in cities including Dallas, Philadelphia, St. Louis, and St. Paul. Milles's final work, a 70-foot fountain called God on the Rainbow, graces the entrance to the harbor of Stockholm, where the sculptor was born and where a museum is dedicated to his work.
The installation of the angels represents the second work by a major twentieth-century sculptor to find a place amid the historic and more modern buildings that harmonize on the Kenyon campus. A work by the English sculptor Henry Moore stands in the College's new science quadrangle. Both sculptures came to Kenyon from architect Graham Gund, Class of 1963, who loaned the Moore piece to the College and who purchased the Milles work from the artist's estate specifically for the Kenyon campus.
One of the nation's leading liberal arts and sciences colleges and home to the Kenyon Review, Kenyon College offers 1,550 students a challenging educational experience enriched by a culture of friendship. Graduates of the college have included actor and philanthropist Paul Newman and Pulitzer-prize winning author E. L. Doctorow.