which it hangs, suspended from rafters by cables in the Academic Core Building. The piece was mounted in the space between the glass walls of the library and the second and third floor balconies. The installation floats unobtrusively in the soft, natural light that filters through the Academic Core Mall and reflects imagery consistent with recurring motifs of Puryear's work such as ships and embryonic forms which are visible in pieces such as, Bask (1976) in which both the shape and construction of ships is referenced by the piece's form and the technique used to build it. The Load, 2012 Lacking any means of conveyance, the full-size two-wheeled cart in The Load sits poised as if ready to move at a moment's notice, with its twelve-foot harness pole parallel to the ground resting on a center prop. Mounted atop the axle of the cart is a gridded wooden box that encages a white sphere fitted with a glass aperture. The glass aperture faces the rear of the cart, an accessible portal through which a viewer can glimpse the complex interior structure of the wooden sphere. The cart is an immediately recognizable object, although from no particular time or place in history. Two-wheeled carts have been in use since the second millennium BCE, and are common in cultures worldwide, making it both culturally and temporally ambiguous. In futuristic white, the sphere juxtaposes the aged wood of the cart. The Load revisits the wheel as an object with functional and symbolic meanings in the work of Puryear, who often deals with escapism, flight, and mobility. Slavery Memorial, 2014 References External links Roberta Smith's article in the NYT, Nov. 2, 2007 Martin Puryear at Matthew Marks Gallery, New York. David Levi-Strauss interview with Martin Puryear from Brooklyn Rail, November 2007 Puryear's Guggenheim Museum Biography Martin Puryear at McKee Gallery Martin Puryear at McKee Gallery, New York Martin Puryear retrospective at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 2008–2009 1941 births Living people Yale School of Art alumni Catholic University of America alumni 20th-century American sculptors 20th-century American male artists 21st-century American sculptors 21st-century American male artists American male sculptors Members of the American Academy of Arts and Letters Postmodern artists MacArthur Fellows Peace Corps volunteers Artists from Washington, D.C. United States National Medal of Arts recipients 20th-century American printmakers African-American contemporary artists American contemporary artists African-American sculptors African-American printmakers 20th-century African-American artists 21st-century