Inside the Haunting Restoration of a Gas Chamber Execution Sculpture
Inside the Haunting Restoration of a Gas Chamber Execution Sculpture Bruce Conner’s CHILD has been difficult from the start—hard to look at, hard to appreciate, and harder still to preserve. The controversial sculpture, completed in 1960, was Conner’s response to the gas chamber execution of Caryl Chessman, a man sentenced to death for kidnapping and raping a woman in Los Angeles. As the piece quickly drew critical attention, a curator at MoMA lobbied for its acquisition, but the museum felt it might be too unpalatable for viewers and decided against it. When the sculpture finally made its way into the collection 10 years later, it proved to be problematic—but for structural reasons rather than polemics. The piece spent the next several decades quietly falling apart in storage, until 2015, when MoMA conservators had a stroke of genius and mapped out a plan for its resurrection. The piece is currently on view as part of the retrospective Bruce Conner: It’s All True. Likened to a “gra...