World's Largest Shuttlecocks (Nelson-Atkins)

Kansas City's neoclassical art museum is the net, and its lawns are the court. That was the idea behind Shuttlecocks, four oversized badminton birdies that the artists Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen placed around the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in 1994.

The museum says the husband-and-wife team responded to the formality of the original building and the green expanse of its lawn by imagining the museum as a badminton net and the lawn as a playing field. The four shuttlecocks were placed as though they had just landed on opposite sides of the net. Whitney Museum notes describe the pair seeing the site's resemblance to a tennis court. The work was made of aluminium, fibreglass-reinforced plastic and paint, fabricated by Merrifield-Roberts, Inc., and acquired through the generosity of the Sosland Family.