Bill Rutherford Studio

Bill had the good fortune to be raised in Highland Park, Illinois, a city, along with its neighboring suburbs, which was blessed with beautiful architecture. Sunday drives often wound along the lakefront where spacious residences, from Art Deco to Victorian and every “Revival” imaginable, stood proudly. Four years at Gettysburg College also served to instill in him an immutable sense of history and preservation, intensifying those earlier recollections.

In the 1960s, Bill was impressed by Alexander Calder’s mobiles, and tried his hand at creating a few until it occurred to him that he was just copying a master. He worked in stained glass for a while after his wife, Cynthia, gave him a soldering gun one Christmas, at which time she also enrolled him in the American Craft Council. In 1965, Bill saw an exhibit at the Wichita Art Museum entitled “Toys for Grown Ups” that included a 55 gallon drum painted orange, lavender, and pink that went “clunk” when turned by a crank. This caught his eye and his imagination, and he set to work on his own kinetic pieces immediately, and by February, 1966, was accepted into his first national, juried exhibit. Whimsical flying machines, ornithopters, kinetic toys made from tin cans of all sizes, “Blooming Idiots,” some in pink, orange and lavender, appeared from his kitchen table where he often worked through the night.

Around this time Bill started to make houses from a single strand of wire, rather like a line drawing in space, with windows and details highlighted in brass and copper. From those he moved on to the architectural replicas of houses, using brass and copper as covering over a bronze rod frame. His metal sculptures of houses, schools, commercial buildings, and historical treasures became widely popular, and a feature article in Historic Preservation Magazine in the autumn of 1979 set his course for years to come.

Bill has been an active and motivating force in the art world of Wichita, among other things the Director of the Wichita Arts Council for five years.

In the 1990s, returning to the influence of Calder and the sand-cast bronze bells of Paolo Solari, Bill began sculpting  windbells. They hung laterally with wind-catching fins projecting horizontally and activating the clapper within the bells. He produced close to 10,000 bells which were marketed through catalogs and showrooms from coast to coast.

Then in 2005, Bill returned to creating brass and copper replicas of residential and commercial properties alike. He considers this the most satisfying work of his entire career.