Looking Up

A stainless-steel giant tips its head back to gaze at the sky outside the James S. McDonnell Planetarium in Forest Park, and its surface looks crumpled and hand-worked. Looking Up is by Tom Friedman, a St. Louis native who took a BFA in graphic illustration at Washington University in 1988, according to the Gateway Foundation. The Science Center gives its size as 33.3 feet and 7,000 pounds, and says it is polished stainless steel, textured by molding and lost-wax casting, representing humans pondering space and the stars. Roadside America, writing about the Council Bluffs, Iowa, edition, says Friedman made the figure to appear as if built from mashed-up aluminum roasting pans and crumpled foil, and calls it a nod to Alberto Giacometti's stretched figures. The Science Center calls the St. Louis figure the third of three: the first is at the Laguna Gloria campus of The Contemporary Austin in Texas, and the second was on Chicago's lakefront through September 2018. The Gateway Foundation dates the work to 2014 and says it has loaned the piece to the Science Center, which describes the loan as permanent. Sources differ on arrival: the Science Center says the Gateway Foundation and Acme Erectors installed it in 2017, while Forest Park Forever says late September 2018. The planetarium is at 5100 Clayton Avenue. The Science Center's outdoor grounds also hold an F/A-18B Hornet and dinosaur statues, so the sculpture sits among several things to see outside the building.