Oldenburg, Claes, 1929-2022

Claes Oldenburg is an artist and scultpor resposnible for the Flashlight sculpture between the Artemus Ham Concert Hall and the Judy Bayley Theatre on the University of Nevada, Las Vegas campus. He was born in 1929 in Stockholm, Sweden. Because of his father's job as a diplomat, the family moved frequently between the United States and Norway until they settled down in Chicago, Illinois in 1936.

Oldenburg was educated at Yale University, studying literature and art history, and also attended the Art Insitute of Chicago. From 1952 to 1954, he was an apprentice reporter at the City News Bureau of Chicago. In 1956, he moved to New York City, New York. It was here that his art career blossomed, and he became a perfomance art figure in New York for most of the 1950s and 1960s.

In 1977, he married Coojse Van Bruggen, whom he has collaborated on for many of his projects since they met. Oldenburg has been honored by museums around the world for his art, most notably a solo exhibition of his work at the Musuem of Modern Art in New York in 1969 and a retrospective of his work at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. in 1995. He owns homes and works in New York, California, and the Loire Valley, France.

Sources:

UNLV Magazine. “The Back Story: The Flashlight.” University of Nevada, Las Vegas, 2018. https://www.unlv.edu/news/article/back-story-flashlight.

“Claes Oldenburg.” Guggenheim Museum, May 30, 2013. https://www.guggenheim.org/artwork/artist/claes-oldenburg.