About the Art
The Schottenstein Center is home to Ohio State’s men’s and women’s basketball and men’s ice hockey. To acknowledge this and celebrate the university’s rich athletic history, artist Alexis Smith designed six figurative elements to be worked into the terrazzo flooring at the facility’s principal entry points. The building's south end celebrates basketball. In the southwest rotunda an imposing image of All-American John Havlicek, a 1960 National Championship team member, stretches across the floor. Averill Roberts, a Buckeye who participated in the women’s Final Four during her senior year in 1993, dominates the southeast entryway. Nearby three players from the 1916 women’s basketball club, Roberts’s predecessors in a sense, peer out from a scarlet Block O.
The Schott’s northeast rotunda includes a kind of companion image: figures from the 1890 men’s baseball team, Ohio State's first varsity sport, occupy another Block O there. The enormous figure of basketball coaching legend Fred Taylor extends across the adjacent entryway, but he is depicted as the student baseball player he was in 1950, Ohio State’s first All-American in that sport. The image of the men’s hockey player in the northwest rotunda is a composite, different in that regard from the larger-than-life individuals dominating the other entrances; the intention here is to celebrate the collective history of men’s hockey at the university.
Collection of The Ohio State University. Partially funded through the Ohio Percent for Art program.
Material
Stone, mother-of-pearl, glass chips
Location
Inside of the Schottenstein Center
About the Artist
Alexis Smith is principally known as a California conceptual artist who produced installations, collages and assemblages out of found materials drawn from American popular culture. In the mid-1980s, however, she also began making public art works in more permanent materials, including Snake Path, a 560-foot long slate and concrete walkway for the Stuart Collection at the University of California-San Diego, and the mosaic-like terrazzo floors for the south and west lobbies of the Los Angeles Convention Center, one depicting the night sky, the other a projection of the globe centered on the Pacific Rim. Smith was based in Los Angeles and that city, Hollywood and celebrity culture frequently played a role in her work, as did literature, especially that of American writers such as Jack Kerouac, Gertrude Stein and Walt Whitman.
