As a sculptor, Assistant Professor of Art Rob Neilson is anything but a formalist. Trained at the College for Creative Studies and with a Master of Fine Arts degree from the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, he works with a variety of materials in composing sculpture and public art.
As a native of Detroit, where his father worked for Kasle Steel, he spent his youth climbing around scrap yards, seeking out various discarded metals that could be formed into art. Finding metal alone to be too limiting in expression, he began exploring the use of rubber, plastics, and other exotic materials.
His recent sculpture, Two-Headed Trojan Ducky, which was displayed on Chicago’s Navy Pier during the Tenth Annual Navy Pier Walk exhibition in 2004, not only looked like a rubber duck but also felt like one because it was carved out of EPS foam and then coated with a thick yellow rubber veneer.
In addition to his many gallery exhibitions and installations, Neilson has received public art commissions from the City of Los Angeles, the Los Angeles Metro Transit Authority, and St. Elizabeth Hospital in Appleton, among others. One such commission, awarded by the City of Long Beach Transit Authority in 2004, is a steel sculpture of a figurative male stepping onto a bus while holding an armload of books. The sculpture will be erected at the public transportation station in front of the Mark Twain branch of the Long Beach library.
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