Come join two generations of Buckminster Fuller’s family and celebrate a “Bucky Weekend” honoring his legacy in this region. The Center for Spirituality and Sustainability is hosting an opening reception of their new Fuller Dome Gallery. This new exhibition space is located inside the Buckminster Fuller designed Fuller Dome on the campus of Southern Illinois University Edwardsville. It opens with a reception on Friday, November 9th running from 7:00 to 9:00 pm.
Examples of Bucky’s art prints that will be on view in the Fuller Dome Gallery
The opening reception will feature an exhibition of Buckminster Fuller’s art print portfolio entitled Inventions: Twelve Around One. This print portfolio was gifted to the Center for Spirituality and Sustainability in 2017 by the Estate of Buckminster Fuller and was received into the SIUE University Museum collection in cooperation with the SIUE Foundation. This important set of art prints, produced in 1981, features 13 of Buckminster Fuller’s most significant inventions presented as drawings as well as duotone photographs of those inventions. Future exhibitions in the Fuller Dome Gallery will be curated from the SIUE University Museum’s culturally significant collection of art and artifacts. The framing of the Fuller art prints and the creation of the Fuller Dome Gallery was made possible through a grant from The Meridian Society.
Bucky Fuller’s daughter, Allegra Fuller Snyder, his granddaughter Alexandra May and her husband Sam May will be in attendance for the gallery’s opening, which is part of the “Bucky Weekend” presented at the Fuller Dome. The opening reception of the Fuller Dome Gallery is free and open to the public; however, a premium ticket is available for private events with Bucky’s family that include a VIP Preview of the exhibition and a Bucky related art and architecture tour of the St Louis area.
For a Fuller Experience: We are offering a limited release of 30 Premium Tickets at $100 per ticket for you to enjoy an exclusive VIP Preview of the Fuller Dome Gallery art exhibition with Bucky’s family on Friday, November 9th from 6:00 PM to 7:00 PM. Your ticket gets you exclusive access to the preview with hors d’oeuvres and an open bar before the public reception that opens at 7:00 pm.
Plus you’ll have exclusive access to a Bucky related art & architectural tour on the following day in a chartered bus with lunch provided. The tour begins from the SIUE Fuller Dome on Saturday, November 10th at 9:00 am and will cover an array of Bucky related sites and history found in the St Louis area. The tour plans to return to the SIUE Fuller Dome at 4:00 pm. Premium tickets for the VIP Preview on 11/9/18, includes the bonus architectural tour with Bucky’s family on Saturday, 11/10/18.
Bucky Art & Architecture Tour:
The tour begins at the Bucky designed SIUE Fuller Dome at 9:00 am on Saturday 11/10. After meeting in the dome we’ll board a chartered bus in front of the Fuller Dome at SIUE in Visitor Parking Lot B
The first stop is the Mary Brown Center in East St Louis. This is a built example of Bucky’s 1965 Laminar Geodesic Dome patent. It was built in 1968 and housed the “town hall” meetings for Bucky’s Old Man River City Project he designed for East St Louis in collaboration with Washington University at the urging of famed East St Louis dancer, Katherine Dunham and Wyvetter H. Younge, an Illinois state representative serving East St Louis.
The second stop will be the Union Tank Car dome in Woodriver Illinois. The Woodriver dome was built in 1961. It’s 384-foot-wide by 120-foot-high geodesic dome. It was constructed for the Union Tank Car Company for the repair of railroad oil tank cars. Synergetics, Inc., a company founded by Bucky, built this as a pair of tank car domes, but the earlier dome in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, built in 1958 was demolished 2008. At the time, the two domes were the world’s largest clear-span structures.
Our Lunch stop in St Louis at the Kranzberg Foundation’s “Zack” Building is presented by the Creative Exchange Lab. Bucky’s daughter Allegra Fuller will do a reading from he father’s essay entitled “Geoview.” This essay was written for the inauguration of Bucky’s SIUE dome. A box lunch will be provided and during lunch you can enjoy a presentation on the construction of St Louis’ “Climatron” dome at the Missouri Botanical gardens.
After lunch we are going to the Ruth Asawa Exhibition at St Louis’ Pulitzer Arts Foundation. Artist Ruth Asawa drew inspiration from Bucky as one of his students at Black Mountain College, NC. Ruth and Bucky remained life-long friends and an important Asawa sculpture that hung in Bucky’s Carbondale Illinois dome home is on loan to for exhibit from Bucky’s daughter Allegra.
After taking in the Ruth Asawa exhibition we will return the SIUE dome by approximately 4:00 pm.
Space is limited and demand is high so reserve your ticket today by clicking the link below or call Juli Jacobsen at (618) 650-3246 to reserve a spot.
This “Bucky Weekend” was made possible through the partnership and collaborative effort of:
