Archive for one sculpture: Untitled, Rockne Krebs, 1968.
Aluminum and light reflective tape, 154” H x 154” W x 120” D

Exhibits: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1968 Annual Exhibition Contemporary American Sculpture; Jefferson Place Gallery, 1968, Washington, DC; Byron Gallery, 1968, New York, NY, and
​used in fashion photos.

“One is a room-activating composition of aluminum triangles… For the viewer feels as if Krebs has discovered something as monumentally simple as the triangle or the space within a room. It is this simplicity, rather than the shifting richness that swirl about it, that persists in the viewer’s memory…
 
Krebs has written that he likes “the emptiness” of rooms, that he wants “the six planes that form the urban interiors through which our bodies move” to form the armatures for the sculpture that he makes.” Washington Post, Paul Richard, Restraint Enhances Young Washington Artist’s Sculptures, 1968.

Sun Dog, Rockne Krebs, 1976 
Solar and laser installations for the U.S. Bicentennial Expo Science and Technology, the Kennedy Space Center, Cape Canaveral, FL.
​In 1976 Sun Dog was the first work of art ever commissioned by the
National Endowment for the Arts.

Sun dogs are a member of a large family of halos, created by light interacting with ice crystals in the atmosphere. Sun dogs appear as two subtly colored patches of light approximately 22° to the left and right of the Sun.

Altman, Stephen.  The Cultural Post, National Endowment for the Arts, July/August 1976, Let There Be Light Sculpture.

 "When the Los Angeles County Museum of Art launched its first Art & Technology program back in 1967, the idea of artists and technologists collaborating was radical—and the art world wasn’t quite ready."

GUESTS

Patrick McCray, Professor of History, University of California, Santa Barbara
John Craig Freeman, Public Artist, Professor of New Media Art, Emerson College
Brian Mullins, Founder, CEO, DAQRI, Los Angeles, California

From the Archives: Art and Technology at LACMA, 1967–1971 on view March 2015 - October 25, 2015.

The Miami Line Water Reflections / Rockne Krebs 
Public Art Light Sculpture

Video by Rockne Krebs, 1987

“Rockne Krebs’ iconic The Miami Line…lets you know, lest you forget, that you are in The Magic City.” Aventura Magazine, 2012. 

“…The Miami Line, a magnificent public art work by Rockne Krebs …to create a brilliant, soaring line of colored light pulsing through the city’s heart, casting a magical shimmer of ever-changing color on the river.” Art Circuits, Miami Line Spans City with Art, 2012.

Crystal Willow slideshow presentation click here.

Photo: Crystal Willow, Rest in light Rockne Krebs, December 2011  © Lars Hasselblad Torres

"After physicists first demonstrated the optical laser in May 1960, scientists and engineers started thinking of what they could do with it. So did artists."   (For complete article by Patrick McCray click here.)

"Another notable effort was by Rockne Krebs, an American artist who made laser-based sculptures for several years starting in the late 1960's." 

"Over time, Krebs expanded his focus from small-scale efforts using lasers in rooms and galleries to ambitious outdoor installations that incorporated building and landscapes into the work. Harking back – unconsciously, most likely – to Garmire’s experiments, his piece The Green Hypotenuse (1983) used a 7 mile-long laser beam that stretched from the observatory on Mt. Wilson down to Caltech."

"A key difference between Garmire’s “lasergrams” and installations made by artists like Krebs is the latter’s ephemeral nature. When the laser was turned off, the art disappeared. All that’s left are the sketches that went into its planning – “drawings for sculpture you can walk through” according to the title for one Krebs’ exhibit...." 

 - Patrick McCray

Christmas Lights Kansas City, Missouri, 1956, by Rockne Krebs. 

“I find CITY LIGHTS painted in 1956 by Krebs as a teenager of the Christmas lights in the Plaza in Kansas City, prophetic of the homages to the urban landscape that he would create a decade and a half later and would describe in a 1972 essay titled Light Is The City At Night.  In the interim Krebs would pursue the rather typical course of the serious student artist, majoring in sculpture at the University of Kansas with the sculptors Elden Tefft, Bernard Frazier, Jim Bass and James Sterrit.  The fact of his long artistic apprenticeship has been over looked because he appeared to most art world observers to have been born with lasers in the sixties….”   Jay Belloli, 1990