Nalia

Year1982

Classification sculpture

Medium bronze plate with colored patinas

Dimensions116 × 59 × 30 in. (294.6 × 149.9 × 76.2 cm)

Credits Commissioned through the Art in Architecture Program
Fine Arts Collection
U.S. General Services Administration

Nalia is a welded bronze-plate sculpture created by Lynda Benglis for the courtyard of the federal building in Albany, New York. The sculpture is slightly curved, with its concave side facing east, towards Broadway. The surface of the artwork comprises a patchwork of undulating bands of textured metal that originally had a uniformly reddish-brown patina, and which was intended to weather partly into a greenish hue. The meandering, ribbon-like form that vertically traverses the center of the sculpture resembles the path of a river, like the nearby Hudson, which runs approximately 145 miles south from Albany to Manhattan, the location of Benglis’s studio. The overlapping patterns on the surface of the sculpture also recall the signature free-form poured latex artworks that Benglis made at the start of her career in the late 1960s. Despite the monumental appearance of Nalia, Benglis developed its thin, shield-like form partly in response to the weight limits of the plaza, as well as the constraints of the project’s comparatively modest budget. The 10-inch-tall, brass-and-copper presentation model for Nalia that Benglis made in 1981 is preserved in the collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C.