The Town-Ho's Story

The Town-Ho’s Story is the first free-standing sculpture created by Frank Stella.  The artwork takes its title from a chapter of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, in which Town-Ho is the name of a ship, derived from the cry of sailors catching sight of a whale.  The rich assortment of characters, settings and themes found in Melville’s novel fueled a large body of Stella’s work over the course of twelve years.  During this period, GSA commissioned Stella to create an artwork for the Ralph H. Metcalfe Federal Building in Chicago.  Installed in the building’s spacious lobby, The Town-Ho’s Story is a materially complex sculpture conceived in response to its site. The artwork’s colossal physicality creates a dramatic contrast with the ordered geometry of the federal building.

The Town-Ho’s Story comprises myriad elements assembled atop a lattice-like pedestal.  The sculpture’s roughly textured components appear gathered together by some powerful magnetic or gravitational force, while still maintaining a pulsating, shape-shifting sense of movement.  Stella’s fabrication of the sculpture involved his improvisational assembly of salvaged metal parts, over which he poured molten aluminum to create a shimmering, lacey veil that introduces a note of delicacy into an otherwise robust composition.  Similarly, the sculpture’s open-frame base and the mesh grids at its apex frame and soften a dense core.

Stella has said that the sculpture “is related to the urban industrial environment; that is what this part of the world is about. It’s related to Chicago’s great architecture and the quality of steel that goes into its buildings.”