Los Angeles Modern Auctions (LAMA)

American artist George Rhoads was born and raised in Evanston, Illinois in 1926. He studied at both the University of Chicago and the Art Institute of Chicago before moving to New York City to focus on painting portraits and impressionistic urban landscapes. However, he did not receive much attention for these early works. After moving to Paris in 1952, Rhoads made the acquaintance of Gershon Legman, an origami master who familiarized Rhoads with the work of Akira Yoshizawa. In subsequent years, Rhoads himself became something of an origami expert, pioneering the Blintzed Bird Base, a now standard fold for making an animal with four legs, two ears, and a tail from a single sheet of paper.

"Each pathway that the ball takes is a different drama, as I call it, because the events happen in a certain sequence, analogous to drama. The ball gets into certain difficulties. It does a few things. Maybe there's some conflict. They hit or they wander, whatever it is and then there's some kind of dramatic conclusion."

The meticulous attention to detail required to make origami served Rhoads well as he shifted in the 1960s to creating audio-kinetic metal sculptures that functioned as elaborate ball machines. Composed of ingenious tracks, loops, ramps, switches, and weights, Rhoads' ball machines suggest the syncopated precision of watches or clocks and the thrilling, unpredictable journey of rollercoasters. Rhoads cited various models for his work in this area: Alexander Calder's abstract constructions, Jean Tinguely's kinetic, self-destructing sculptures, and Rube Goldberg's cartoons of byzantine contraptions. In addition to smaller, standalone works, Rhoads produced many larger commissions, often enclosed in glass, for public spaces, children's hospitals, shopping malls, transportation centers, and museums. While these installations might be considered a form of mass entertainment or spectacle, Rhoads deemed his audio-kinetic sculptures a kind of serious art, which engaged intensely with modern mechanization and encouraged viewer interaction.

As the demand for Rhoads' work grew, he partnered with Robert McGuire at RockStream Studios in Ithaca, New York to generate ball machines at greater scale. Soon thereafter, Rhoads' sculptures were included on an episode of Mister Rogers' Neighborhood. One of Rhoads' most famous commissions is a large, red ball machine encased in glass, 42nd Street Ballroom, which was installed in New York's Port Authority Bus Terminal in 1983. During the decades that followed, many more sculptures by Rhoads were added to public sites and acquired by prestigious institutions, such as the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Art Institute of Chicago. Creative Machines became the professional heir to Rhoads' ball machines in 2007. Since then, they have been producing sculptures very similar to those that Rhoads engineered to wide acclaim. In 2021, Rhoads passed away at the age of ninety-five at his son's home in Chinon, France.