Inspiration: Monument to a Lost Glove

This is an installation work by the Russian born, American artist Ilya Kabakov. The work consists of a red plastic woman's glove on the floor surrounded by nine engraved metal music stands arranged in a semicircular fashion. Each stand is engraved with a poem written by fictional woman who have seen this red glove and been inspired by it. The work was created in 1996 in Lyon, France and later recreated as a public art piece on the corner of Broadway and 23rd Street in New York.

Ilya Kabakov's intent for the work was to resurrect the lost art of eulogy, sonnet, and epigraph once highly valued from the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries, before the rise of the iron age, the twentieth century. The rather ordinary red glove becomes an extremely loaded symbol of poetic values and form.

Special thanks to artist Sarah Kabot for directing me to this piece. Sarah Kabot is an Assistant Professor in Drawing and Foundation at the Cleveland Institute of Art in Cleveland, OH.