Martin Donlin's "Dream Beyond the Clouds"
Two new commissioned works of art will soon greet travelers in the terminals of St. Louis Lambert International Airport, providing beauty, history, and meditations on moving through space.
In March, the airport unveiled Dream Beyond the Clouds, a work comprising three 4-by-6-foot glass panels in a 14-foot-long stainless steel base. The work by Martin Donlin, which marked the airport’s 100th anniversary, explores the life of founder Major Albert Bond Lambert. And this Tuesday, the saturated colors and ceramic tiles of Sarah Morris’ work The Building as Pretext [Sound Graph] will appear. Her piece, which draws inspiration from sound and her work as a filmmaker, also reflects on human movement through space.
Both works are in the Minoru Yamasaki–designed Terminal 1, and both are funded through the Lambert Art and Culture Program. Donlin and Morris each explore the particular and transitory experience of airports as in-between spaces, and their work communicates with the jet age architecture of the space.
Donlin, whose work appears in airports worldwide, began his process with research, learning about Lambert himself as well as the terminal. A sculptural screen by Harry Bertoia, which had been in the terminal in the mid-'50s, provided inspiration. Donlin’s work portrays Lambert’s life, as well as the place of St. Louis in the history of aviation.
“We wanted to know about flight, dreams of far-off places, homecoming, the area you live in as well,” says Donlin.
Generally, his research begins with travel to the place where his work will be, as well as interactions with local poets and writers, who can give a sense of a place that far transcends what’s Google-able. Both of those were nearly impossible, of course, during the COVID-19 pandemic. Nonetheless, Donlin knew he wanted to use poetry on his artwork, and so chose a few lines to fill in while he worked.
“I chose T.S. Eliot, from Four Quartets,” Donlin says. “I thought, This just kind of sums this up completely for now. It was a placeholder.” But Donlin quickly learned a new fact about Eliot: He grew up in the same neighborhood as Lambert. “It was serendipity," he says. "It was weird that I chose that poem.”
The thick German-made glass of the piece is surrounded by two thinner pieces. The images are mostly hand-painted, with some silk-screening and deep glass etching. It features vintage photographs, diagrams, maps, and navigation tools. A solar system diagram includes a nod to Lambert’s Olympic medal in golf in the 1904 summer Olympics.
“One of the planets is actually a vintage golf ball,” Donlin says.
Sarah Morris’ ceramic tiles—custom made in Modena, Italy—are a visual vocabulary that she translated from her 2017 film, Finite and Infinite Games. That work, featuring German writer and polymath Alexander Kluge, uses and builds on the text of the book Finite and Infinite Games by James P. Carse.
The book takes the simple metaphor of games to be played and won (finite) and those continued indefinitely for the pleasure of playing (infinite) as a jumping-off point for nuanced insights into human behavior—which Morris extends to the dualistic nature of airports themselves, as beginnings, ends, and midway stops on human journeys.
“It’s not just about architecture, it’s not just about the exact space you’re inhabiting,” Morris says. “It’s just an intermediate space—it could be viewed as a portal to somewhere or a portal to St. Louis. It’s a very open structure in many ways. You’re entering a space that is going to take you to another space.”
The tiles map out her own graphing of Kluge’s voice in the film, with a specific color palette that connects the sky and the interior and exterior spaces.
“There are elements of sound in my paintings, an element of sounds that comes along with color,” Morris says. “It’s not just color, it’s your associations of color—it has an element of transportation, too. It might transport you to a Coca-Cola, it might transport you to a jacket you have. It can be utterly banal, but it can also be spiritual or sublime.”
