'“The city at night is light” Rockne Krebs says...' 1973

The city at night is light, Rockne Krebs says... 1973

I found myself thinking of an evening in 1973, in balmier weather, when I walked from my apartment a few blocks from the
Art Museum to see another temporary installation there,
Sky Bridge Green by Rockne Krebs.

It consisted of a green laser beam shot from the Art Museum to a mirror atop City Hall and bounced several times across the Parkway. The atmosphere was like a party. People kept throwing objects
to see if they could make this monumental beam of
light disappear for a split second.

It was so much fun seeing the amazing light and the community
it created, I went back for several more evenings to see it
again and again.

The Krebs piece dramatized the polarities of the Parkway - with
one end in the heart of the city with its commerce and politics, the other at the Art Museum, representing aesthetic contemplation
and the gateway to a natural world beyond. On the ground, the Parkway often falls short, but Krebs* work shined a new kind
of light on the ideals that brought it into being.
- Thomas Hine,
The Philadelphia Inquirer, January 24, 2019

A roll of 35mm film that has likely been in this cool film canister
since it was developed in 1973. It is a black and white roll of
Krebs* monumental laser sculpture Sky Bridge Green,​commissioned by the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 1973. #unearthing #digitizing

Images in the video 
1-3 scans from the 1973 roll of negatives  /
4-5 photos by Patrick Radebaugh for the museum and the LA Times and Washington Post News Service.  /  Color photo by Rockne Krebs /
newspaper articles  /  Art in America, September-October 1973, color photo  /  Museum wall text from the group exhibition Minimalism in Motion, Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2015  /  Study for Sky Bridge Green in East Court, Philadelphia Festival, Rockne Krebs, 1973. Collection: Philadelphia Museum of Art  /  Study for Sky Bridge Green in East Court, View of Piece from Ben Franklin Parkway Rockne Krebs, 1973. Collection: Philadelphia Museum of Art.

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 (excerpts)
THAT Sky-Pi (later changed to Sky Bridge Green) should really
be called Calder Green. Never mind its given name or nonname.
Just think of it as a laser beam environment.

The laser lights will be greenish in color and here is where the
Calder Green comes in, says Krebs. He sees his piece as
linking three generations of works by the Calder family:
the Alexander Calder mobile in the museum; the Alexander
Stirling Calder Swann Memorial Fountain in Logan Square;
the Alexander Milne Calder statue of Billy Penn atop of City Hall.

Using a laser beam is just a way of making sculpture,
says Krebs, 34, whose 19 other laser environments have
been shown nationwide. The laser is a tool, not unlike a pencil.
The light from the laser is constituted so you can direct it to get
linear drawings in space.

It is an unusual 20th Century kind of structural drawing, says
Krebs, who points to historical precedents, such as Naum Gabo*s Cathedral of Light, of using light as the structure for art.
- Nessa Forman, Art Editor,
The Philadelphia Evening Bulletin,
Laser Sky-Pi Will Light Up Parkway Tonight,
May 11, 1973 (excerpts)

I was working at the Philadelphia Museum of Art back in 1973, when David Katzive, the head of the Museum's Division of Education and the Urban Outreach Program, commissioned Sky Bridge Green, which was one of  the most extraordinary, beautiful artworks I have ever experienced.

I watched Rockne tinker with the impressively huge laser that he had set up on the east portico of the Museum to shoot a beam of light straight down the Benjamin Franklin Parkway to a mirror on Billy Penn's hat on the top of City Hall. 
- William F. Stapp, December 2, 2012 
Former Curator of Photography, The National Portrait Gallery, Washington, DC  / Former Staff Lecturer Education Department, The Philadelphia Museum of Art

Excerpt from Rockne Krebs: Photographs + Interpretations by Carol Harrison, 2013.

-HK