Tom Shannon (born June 23, 1947) is an American artist and inventor.
Personal life and education
Shannon was born in Kenosha, Wisconsin to parents John Kingsley Shannon, a Marine pilot and inventor, and Audrey Elizabeth Shannon. He has two brothers, John and James. Shannon attended the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. He received his MFA in 1971 from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. On September 26, 1990 Shannon married Catherine Matisse Monnier, a great granddaughter of Henri Matisse and granddaughter of Marcel Duchamp. Shannon and his family live in New York City.
Career
Shannon's work incorporates scientific themes. Shannon built Squat, an interactive robotic sculpture at his father's battery manufacturing plant in the summer of 1966. Squat won the Pauline Palmer Prize at the Chicago Art Institute that year in a show juried by James Speyer and Walter Hopps.
Squat, made at 19 years old, was included in the landmark exhibition The Machine as Seen at the End of the Mechanical Age at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1969. It is considered a seminal work in robotic art. In 2019, "Squat" was restored under the direction of the artist by a team led by Robert Sieger, at Guardian Fine Art, Milwaukee, WI. Restored, "Squat" was a key work of art in a June-August 2019 exhibition of international sculpture, curated by Laura Sims Peck, at The Warehouse, Milwaukee, WI. The exhibition included work by twenty-one artists from twelve countries and three continents. During the run of the exhibition, Shannon presented an overview of his work which was videoed, and is the core of a new documentary film being made on Shannon's work and career.
In 1981, the first of Shannon's large magnetically levitated sculptures, the seven-meter long Compass of Love, was exhibited in New York, then purchased by the Musee d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. The system of permanent magnets employed was designed by Shannon.
In 1983, Shannon patented and produced an edition of 20 World Clocks with the participation of Fuller and Sadao's cartography. An example is in the collection of the Buckminster Fuller Institute and the Smithsonian American History Museum.
Pontus Hulten, through the French Ministry of Culture, commissioned Shannon to make a major work for La Villette. Shannon designed a 17-meter diameter spherical array of computer-controlled RGB LED nodes equidistantly spaced like atoms in a crystal, called The Crystal Ball. . In 1991, the Moderna Museet in Stockholm purchased Shannon's first room-sized magnetic array, Compass Moon Atom Room.
In 2000, Shannon commissioned Aerovironment to perform a feasibility study for Air Genie Video Airship. A US Patent was granted 2003. Shannon was commissioned by the Grande Palais in Paris to make a movie of his Airlands project (aka Outlands) for a major millennial show covering ten thousand years of Visions of the Future.
His sculptures have since been included in international exhibitions such as the Centre Pompidou, the Stedelijk Museum, Moderna Museet, the Venice Biennale, the Sao Paulo Biennial, the Biennale de Lyon, the Musee d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Art Tower Mito and the Whitney Museum. He was a featured artist at the 2003 TED Conference where he presented Air Genie, a spherical helium airship whose entire surface is a LED video screen. He also presented a series of paintings made by a remote-controlled pendulum in another TED talk in 2009.
Sculpture
Shannon's work is idea driven. His subject matter is that of existential conditions, i.e., the forces, properties, characteristics, proportions, the web of sensations and knowledge of which we are a part. For example, Ray (1986) is a sculpture of the spheres of the Sun and Earth in proportion, and the cone of energy, gravity, electromagnetic, luminous, that connects the two.
Shannon makes magnetically levitated sculpture. The sculptures are suspended using permanent magnets. His series of suspended arrays includes room-filling three-dimensional crystalline arrangements of magnetic spheres each of which orient to Earth's magnetic field like a compass.
His recent work includes large outdoor sculptures which behave as weightless objects. The sculpture's internal mechanisms consisted of axles, ball-bearings, universal joints, ball & sockets, fulcrums and massive counterweights, give them the ability to spin, tilt, rise/fall and glide horizontally and eventually return to equilibrium.
Shannon designed the TED Prize, the Buckminster Fuller prize and the Trophee Jules Verne installed at the Musee de la Marine in Paris.
