Walter Hood, Hood Design Studio, Oakland CA
(American, b. 1958)
Grinnell Crossroads, 2020
Site-specific installation, wood, concrete, crushed stone, plantings
Commissioned by Grinnell College
Located: City lot at southeast corner of Hwy 6 and Hwy 146
Grinnell Crossroads welcomes people to the community by honoring the past and providing a space of respite in the present. Located at the crossing of two state highways, the installation is inspired by the foundations and walls of two homes and a carriage house that originally stood on this site. The diagonal lattice walls evoke local wooden covered bridges and fences. Visitors circulate on paths that echo walkways at Grinnell College, moving through the ghost houses. Grinnell Crossroads celebrates the crossing and intersecting lives and histories that compose Grinnell.
Walter Hood is the winner of a MacArthur “Genius” Grant in 2019 and numerous other awards. The work routes visitors between this site and campus, inviting participants to uncover remnants of Grinnell’s past to bring them into the present. Hood combined collective exploration with archival research to create Grinnell Crossroads, activating a once-vacant lot with memory and life.
About the Artist
Walter Hood, a native of Charlotte, NC, received his BA in architecture from North Carolina A&T State University. He has both his Masters of Architecture and Masters of Landscape Architecture from the University of California, Berkeley, along with an MFA in studio arts and sculpture from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He founded Hood Design Studio in Oakland, California in 1992 where he designs both local, community-based projects and major landscape architecture commissions for institutions from the DeYoung Museum (San Francisco) to the University of Virginia. Hood teaches landscape architecture at UC Berkeley.
By: Lesley Wright, Director, Grinnell College Museum of Art