From the Archive: Washington, DC, 1970. Scanning negatives,
a roll of creative minds at work together. 
Walter Hopps, Joe Cameron, Dorothy Gilliam, Sam Gilliam, John Gossage, and more.  Photographs by Rockne Krebs.  Never-before-printed.  Help naming the unidentified people would be appreciated.

Walter Hopps, 1970, arriving at Sam Gilliam’s, Washington, DC

Bob Elliott, Jr., 1970, and a great candid shot.

The contact sheet, Washington, DC, 1970

- HK

On this day in 1976, the Rockne Krebs Laser Sculpture installation at the St. Petersburg Municipal Pier was unveiled.  

It consisted to two pieces. The laser beam configuration itself was titled, "Starboard" while the equipment installation inside the Pier was called, "Home on the Range, Part VI." 

I was the Executive Director of the St. Petersburg Arts Commission and the Project Director for Rockne's work here.  It was a really incredible and wondrous work of art so far ahead of its time that technology was not able to keep up with it.  

Like laser light itself, it had a short but brilliant life.

- Glenn Anderson

The Laser and Starboard, Home on the Range, Part VI, St. Petersburg, FL.

St. Petersburg, FL. laser sculpture back in the news.

The Tampa Tribune,  November 6, 2013,
1977 artist’s work debunks rumor of UFO in St. Pete, by Paul Guzzo
Documentation of a 1977 installation by laser artist Rockne Krebs was recently mistaken for documentation of a UFO landing.
A Florida newspaper debunks the myth. 

Excerpt from Glenn Anderson’s remembrance in Rockne Krebs Photographs + Interpretations by Carol Harrison

 A brief anecdote on my friendship with Rockne Krebs

“….I won’t go into details on the wonder of that artwork.  When it was working, it was “other worldly” and the 8th wonder of the world.  But
when it was broken down, it was a curse…The failure was not Rockne’s fault.  He had done the best he could, and brilliantly, but he was always so far ahead of the curve as an artist, science had not kept up with reliable technology.  In that day, large lasers were very temperamental and unreliable but if that was the medium an artist wanted to explore, he had few options.

….I was daily working with him in some way and we were connected at the hip in so far as our futures in St. Petersburg were concerned…. My close daily contact with Rockne gave me insight into both him as a human being and as an artist.  As a functioning human being I experienced his incredible drive and work ethic.  He was driven to see that next thing that “had never been seen before”…the ultimate goal of a highly functioning artist.  As an artist, he was dedicated to the truth and purity of both concept as well as visual experience.  The artist Rockne had to share the scientist Rockne….”  1*

- Glenn Anderson

A Rainbow Tree, 1970

A Rainbow Tree has always caught my eye. I feel my uncle’s art and ideas come from an inner connection that never forgot.  

Never forgot that creation of any kind is not so much putting matter to light, but bringing light to matter.  

A Rainbow Tree at a glance and on the surface might be seen as another way to project light back to the viewer, but as I look deeper I realize that he might be attempting to once again project the viewer into the light.

Rockne Krebs’ artwork and creations have always used a hint of magic to show that the forefront is always the backdrop and vice versa.

A Rainbow Tree, 1970, detail "...on paper he imagined vast, impossible structures such as a Sun Pyramid, and potentially fatal ones such as Lightning Sculpture, and brilliant, barely possible inventions such as A Rainbow Tree." 2*

"...they involve water being sprayed into the air to create rainbows arcing over treetops;  Krebs' notes on A Rainbow Tree explain that 'it can only be seen when the viewer is in a specific position in relation to the piece + the sun. It makes looking at a work of art like looking at the sky and needs to be approached with the same expectancy.'" 1*

It's hard to understand that everything we see on a daily basis IS a sculpted piece of art, and made of light.  That's how I think my uncle saw things.  The only difference is how we choose to view it, that's how the world changes.  We are just witnessing the unfolding of truth in the reflection of a prism rainbow.

Moon Archer, 1974, drawing for a night rainbow

Moon Archer, 1974. Collection of the Georgia Museum of Art

As in A Rainbow Tree, Moon Archer also uses the knowledge of the sculptor, Rockne Krebs, that the observer will not find on the outside what they don't hold on the inside.  

The observer to any projection of light onto the backdrop of the palette of something as pure as water is seemingly impossible especially at night. 

Yet Rockne Krebs inherently knows the feeling of impossible to be the only logical direction to sail.  This direction is where any sculptor proves that the earth is not flat and the observed is never separate from the observer.  This is how he knows, no thought is impossible, only not yet sailed.

ARTFORUM, 1971, ad for Krebs' Spectral Drawings

From the Archive:  “The city at night is light” Krebs says, 1973.

Visiting Gene Davis' Franklin's Footpath, 1972.
It was the world's largest artwork at the time.

Krebs originally called the piece Sky Pi, he re-titled it Sky Bridge Green, perhaps after he and David Katzive met this man admiring the laser sculpture.  “An elderly man, a stranger, was standing there at City Hall gazing in astonishment at the lights that came from the museum.  When Krebs and Katzive then returned to the museum, they met the man again, staring at the light above him, climbing the museum steps. 'It’s like walking into heaven,' said the stranger.”  Richard, Paul.  The Washington Post, 1973, The City at Night Is Light.  Sky Bridge Green was a bridge to the sky hovering above Davis' Franklin’s Footpath.

Rockne Krebs’ lasers pierce the Philadelphia air

"Krebs, for all his precision, thinks about light like a mystic…"

Photo from Art in America, September–October 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.”
​- Hine, Thomas. The Philadelphia Inquirer, January 24, 2019.