Rita McBride (American, born 1960)
Parking Garage, 1992

Run Time: 1:37
Recorded by Mia Farrell, Museum Educator / April 2020

Parking Garage by artist Rita McBride is in many ways exactly what its title claims. Encouraged to be displayed directly on the floor Parking Garage is immediately identifiable. One can see its architecture, its three levels, replication of ramps, and imagining cars fit to scale, filling its empty spaces is easy, seeing what is there – lends to seeing what isn’t.

Through this series of work that McBride began in 1987, she examines and asks us to notice the overlooked buildings that surround us. Her sculptural project, devoted to parking structures, shrinks these spaces down, renders them in materials such as aluminum or in the case of our Parking Garage created in 1992, sandcast bronze. Making it small we gain the advantage, ability to overlook, survey the space while outside of it. McBride gives us the opportunity to engage with architecture and design as sculpture, as physical forms, to play with scale, the idea of models, and to notice any memory, nostalgia, or understanding regarding these things that are built all around us.

Rita McBride was born in Des Moines, IA in 1960. She now lives and works in Los Angles and Dusseldorf She has become notable for her large scale and small scale sculptures, performances, and her work blending architecture and design.