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Art is a Guaranty of Sanity, Ms. Bourgeois’ work for the Convention Center, is a mirror that rises approximately 90 feet from its base below the grand atrium adjacent to Symphony Hall. The mirror face is highly polished steel cut into a spider-web pattern that gives viewers constantly changing views of themselves, the atrium and the phrase “Art is a Guaranty of Sanity,” which is reflected from the yoke holding the mirror. The back of the mirror is sculpted into scalloped ridges of brushed aluminum. The sculpture was fabricated by T.A. Caid Industries, Inc, a specialty metal fabrication firm in Tucson, Arizona.

The artist explored several of her lifelong themes in creating her sculpture for the site. Spiders and webs have intrigued Bourgeois since childhood, when she first grasped similarities between their work as nature's weavers and her mother and family's work as tapestry makers.
Bourgeois has also been fascinated by mirrors. “I see the mirror as giving a multiple view of the world," she said, describing her inspiration for Art is a Guaranty of Sanity: "There is my perception and there is your perception. It can be real, and it can be distorted. Mirrors to me today mean the acceptance of self. Nobody is going to keep me from seeing things objectively. I don't want to see things as I wish them to be but as they are.”

Born in Paris in 1911, Bourgeois moved to New York in 1938 and has been an American citizen since 1951. She is widely recognized as one of the world's foremost living sculptors. President Clinton awarded her the National Medal of the Arts, the nation’s highest honor for visual arts, in 1997. She was the first woman to be honored with a retrospective exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Her work is included in major museums and public art collections in New York, Washington, D.C., Houston and throughout the world, including Canada, Australia, Switzerland, Austria, Italy, France, and the UK.

Photos by Bill Timmerman.