Spoonbridge and Cherry is a sculptural fountain designed by Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen. It was funded by a $500,000 donation from art collector Frederick R. Weisman and is permanently located in the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden. The piece was completed and installed in 1988 for the Sculpture Garden's opening and consists of a large cherry resting atop a large spoon partially straddling a small pond.
History
In the mid-1980s, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota, commissioned a piece of work from married couple Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen, whose first artistic collaboration had come in 1976. The work, which had its $500,000 budget donated by art collector Frederick R. Weisman, was to be placed in the new outdoor Minneapolis Sculpture Garden across Vineland Place from the Walker on land owned by the Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board.
An early concept for the sculpture was a Viking ship with a dragon figurehead set in a circular reflecting pool; a 1986 article in the Star Tribune describes this vision as having been "quickly abandoned". The cherry was contributed by van Bruggen, who found inspiration in the formality of the sculpture garden's design, in the Palace of Versailles, and in the dining etiquette of Louis XIV's court. Martin Friedman, director of the Walker, said of the work that the artists did not intend to craft a "sculptural symbol of Minneapolis" but that he believed Spoonbridge and Cherry would "be a landmark and [would] give a lot of people pleasure". It was placed in the northern portion of the Sculpture Garden by two cranes on May 9, 1988. The Sculpture Garden held opening ceremonies September 9–11 of that year, with an official dedication on September 10 featuring a band of spoon players.
Spoonbridge and Cherry was entirely repainted in 1995. In 2021, the cherry of the Spoonbridge and Cherry was sent to New York to be entirely repainted again. It was returned to the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden in 2022.
Design
Spoonbridge and Cherry measures and straddles a small pond built in the shape of a linden tree seed, evoking the lindens in the surrounding park.
Writing in the Star Tribune a year after the Sculpture Garden's opening, Chris Waddington found the linden seed pond critical to enjoying Spoonbridge, writing that in winter months when the pond was frozen and snowed over, the sculpture "can seem like a soulless mock-up, a quirky idea that lost its charm somewhere between the artist's hand and the factory where it was built; but with spring comes the fountain's spray, the pool's play of liquid reflections on steel and an animate charge that recalls the poetry of the artists' original sketches."
Within a decade of the Sculpture Garden's opening, the Star Tribune reported that Spoonbridge was "something of an icon for the Walker". In 2001, Eric Dregni wrote that the sculpture had "become the unofficial symbol of Minneapolis" and in 2008, City Pages described it as "one of the Twin Cities' most iconic images." The Walker reported receiving more requests for images of Spoonbridge and Cherry than any other work in its collections.