You can easily see this very large—almost three stories
in height—black steel sculpture from Woodward. You may appreciate it more
comprehensively if you walk along Kirby from Woodward to John R. It is almost
directly across Kirby from the Scherer Historical Information Marker.
If the Museum of Modern Art in New York had any green space around it, you might expect to see Gracehoper there. This is a huge piece of modern art. Its creator, Tony Smith, apprenticed as an architect, including two years spent with Frank Lloyd Wright. As he approached his half-century mark, he turned to sculpture and began working in geometric solids such as cubes and tetrahedrons. You see that style in this remarkable piece. It is 46 feet in length, 23 feet wide and 27 feet tall. Tony Smith was 60 when he created this work for the Detroit Institute of Art. He named it for a mythical beast appearing in James Joyce's Finnegan's Wake.
Sculptor: Tony Smith
Material: Steel, painted in black
Date of Installation: 1972
For more information, see: Art in Detroit Public Places; Revised Edition by
Dennis Alan Nawrocki and David Clements; Detroit, Wayne State University Press,
1999.