Cumulate is a new art installation in the Calvin T. Ryan Library created by Leslie Iwai, exploring the beauty and role of clouds in the Nebraska landscape. Suspended cloud sculptures are layered visually, audibly, and tangibly with the work of Nebraska poets, evoking the beauty of the Nebraska landscape and its people. Through this rich gathering of meaning, material, and content, Cumulate merges the physical, the digital, and the ephemeral.
About the Installation
Cumulate begins with a series of mobiles suspending sculptural clouds. Each cloud is folded and formed from thin aluminum sheet metal painted soft white on the outside with bright colors in the interior reflecting the vibrant spectrum of a Nebraska sunrise. The installation celebrates the timeless beauty of clouds and the important role they play in the Nebraska landscape—amassing and moving moisture, refreshing with rain and snow, filtering sunlight, and provoking our imagination.
Like precipitation from clouds, a poet’s distillation of words can reveal the color and life of a landscape and its people. From Willa Cather to Ted Kooser and Don Welch, Nebraska’s poets do so with refreshing insight and beauty. Cumulate houses the poetry—curated for themes of landscape and its relationship to human experience—of nine Nebraska poets, each poet represented by one of Cumulate’s sunrise-inspired colors.
https://www.artscouncil.nebraska.gov/cumulate/