Terry Allen

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Terry Allen
Corporate Head
1990

Project Area: CBD/Financial Core
Project: Citicorp Plaza Phase I
Project Location: Ernst & Young Plaza, 725 S. Figueroa Street
Project Type: Developer

Description:

As part of a series of collaborative works, artist Terry Allen and poet Philip Levine created a life-sized bronze sculpture of a businessman, dressed in a business suit, and carrying a briefcase in his proper left hand. As the sculpture leans forward and submerges his head into the building, he can be seen as a person separate from the office building only from the neck down. The poem, "Corporate Head" completes the image:

They said I had a head for business
They said to get ahead
I had to lose my head.
They said be concrete
& I became
concrete.
They said,
go, my son,
multiply,
divide, conquer.
I did my best.

Artist Profile

Terry Allen was born in Wichita, Kansas in 1943 and raised in Lubbock, Texas. Influenced by country western music and rock and roll, Allen knew from an early age that he wanted to work in the arts and in the mid-1960s traveled to Los Angeles to study at Chouinard Art Institute where he earned his BFA. He then developed a storyline and cast of characters that morphed into a major body of visual art including musical and theatrical performances, sculpture, painting, drawing, video, and installations. Allen’s multimedia windows into the human condition have won him a Guggenheim Fellowship and three grants from the National Endowment for the Arts. The artist’s public works can be found in unconventional places – from Los Angeles’s Citicorp Plaza, to San Francisco’s Moscone Center, to the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The artist currently resides in Santa Fe, New Mexico with his wife, Jo Harvey.