Fall 2026 /Originals/
 

Out in the Open

Yellow and black metal statue in a courtyard

 

If you’ve walked past the Benton Museum of Art recently, you may have noticed a striking yellow-and-black sculpture on display in the courtyard that faces College Avenue. Chris Burden ’69 originally designed the piece, Untitled (2011), as a student project at Pomona, but it wasn’t fabricated until 2011, the year that the Pomona College Museum of Art (now the Benton) opened the exhibition It Happened at Pomona. For that show the museum’s staff worked with Burden to complete the work. After the exhibition closed, the sculpture lived in Lyon Court outside Montgomery Art Hall until 2020, when it was moved to the new Benton building to inaugurate the John and Debbie Starr Family Sculpture Patio. Now, six years later, museum staff have reinstalled Untitled in the John and Louise Bryson Courtyard, where visitors can engage with it “in the round,” on all of its four sides.