Monochrome for Austin Nancy Rubins 50-foot UT

A fifty-foot tangle of aluminium canoes hangs over a campus street at the University of Texas at Austin, held up by a steel structure. Monochrome for Austin is by the American artist Nancy Rubins (born 1952), and Landmarks lists it at the north-west corner of 24th Street and Speedway beside the Norman Hackerman Building. Landmarks, the university's public art programme, commissioned it and describes a large-scale assemblage of seventy aluminium canoes and small boats that draws its support from a steel armature and intertwining cables. Landmarks gives its size as 50 feet tall, 52 feet wide and 41 feet deep, with a 16,000-pound support structure, and says it spans over the street.

It belongs to Rubins's Monochrome series. Landmarks reported that installation took about three weeks in early January 2015, while students were away for winter break. Rubins and a five-person crew placed each boat individually, averaging about five a day, and the sculpture was complete on 17 January. In a 2020 article the university's engineering school explained that the design began as a work that could be installed anywhere, prepared for severe earthquakes, hurricanes and heavy snow; once Austin was chosen, the team could nearly double the number of boats and increase the size. A 30-foot lightning rod runs through the centre of the structure.