About the Art
Ohioan John Glenn became the first American astronaut to orbit the Earth aboard Friendship 7 in 1962. Glenn followed his career as an astronaut by serving the state of Ohio in the U. S. Senate from 1974 to 1999. This long legacy of service is the subject of Point of View, a multimedia installation created for The Ohio State University’s John Glenn College of Public Affairs. The artwork principally consists of three panels featuring imagery reflecting the different phases of Glenn’s life arranged atop a black terrazzo floor adorned with concentric rings evoking the orbital paths of the planets.
The innermost panel of Point of View symbolizes Glenn’s youth. The second panel focuses on his career as an astronaut and includes a famous photograph of Glenn climbing into the cockpit of Friendship 7. The final panel represents Glenn’s political career in the years after his retirement from NASA.
In addition to celebrating Glenn’s illustrious life, Point of View memorializes Harford Steele, a civics teacher at New Concord High School whose course Glenn once claimed “ignited a fire in [him] that never did go out.” A small portrait of Steele lies at the center of Point of View, visible through a sequence of small holes in the three concentric panels. The impact of teachers is reflected in a quotation on the outside edge of the installation: “To mankind’s ever broadening store of knowledge, each much give their own peculiar talents, so that all may better live."
Collection of The Ohio State University. Funded through the Ohio Percent for Art program.
Material
Mixed media
Location
Inside of Page Hall
About the Artist
Eyethink is a graphic design firm based out of Powell, Ohio. They have worked with The Ohio State University on multiple projects, but the most viewed project is the stained-glass windows in the rotunda of Ohio Stadium. The three large panels weigh 2,000 pounds each and were designed by Eyethink. Tom Cullen, a stained-glass artist from Columbus, made the windows. Other notable projects at Ohio State include the Lex Wexner Football Complex and the educational space for the Wexner Center for the Arts exhibition “Transfigurations: Modern Masters from the Wexner Family Collection,” which featured works by Pablo Picasso and Alberto Giacometti among others.
