Alexander Calder was someone who refused to ignore his creative side.After attempting various careers, he found a home with abstract sculpture. He renovated the art form by turning its concept inside-out. He focused as much on what was physically part of the sculpture as the open space surrounding it. This led to Calder's most renown invention: the mobile. He took an art form that focused on dormant objects and turned it into one that moves. He created a new kind of sculpture that has since become popular all around the world.

Calder spent much of his childhood traveling between Philadelphia, New York, and California with his artist parents. Wherever they went, his parents reserved a space intended as Calder's workshop, where he built intricate metal wire sculptures and made his own toys. While they always supported his creativity, his parents wanted him to pursue a different, more stable career. He excelled in math in school, so Calder went on to earn a degree in mechanical engineering in college. He spent a few years trying different engineering jobs, but was dissatisfied with all of them.

He took a chance and decided to pursue an art career and enrolled at the Art Students League in New York to study painting. After graduating, he continued to study in Paris.

During a visit with painter Piet Mondrian, Calder's art dramatically changed. He became interested in abstract art. After seeing a mural of triangles on Mondrian's wall, Calder decided that he wanted to see them move. He created large versions of the triangles and connected them with wire, pulleys, and motors.

This hanging, moving sculpture was coined a "mobile" by another abstract artist and friend Marcel Duchamp because in French the word refers to motion and motive. Calder soon became a leader in the Kinetic Art Movement, which is art that moves or appears to move. "Just as one can compose colors, or forms," Calder said, "so one can compose motions."

In 1949 Calder was one of 250 sculptors who exhibited in the 3rd Sculpture International held at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. His mobile, International Mobile, was the centerpiece of the exhibition and still hangs there today.

In the 1950's, Calder increasingly concentrated his efforts on producing monumental sculptures. Calder's largest sculpture, "El Sol Rojo," was 67 feet high and was constructed for the Olympic games in Mexico City.

Shortly after his death in 1976, Gerald Ford awarded Calder the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the United States' highest civilian honor.

Calder was a major contributor to kinetic and abstract art. His mobiles changed the major concept of a sculpture. Instead of stone or wood masses, he focused on ideas of open space, transparency, light, and movement. Along with other giant sculptures he created later in his career, Calder invented a new type of art -- one that became so successful that many of his works have become landmarks in cities around the globe.

Calder said of his art, "To most people who look at a mobile, it's no more than a series of flat objects that move. To a few, though, it may be poetry."

Untitled, 1942 Sheet metal, wire, paint 62" x 66" x 56" Calder Foundation