Yesterday Washington, D.C.’s Foundation for Art and Preservation in Embassies (FAPE) announced that it had commissioned New York-based sculptor Joel Shapiro to create a new large-scale abstract public sculpture to stand outside the forthcoming U.S. Consulate in Guangzhou, which is being built by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill’s Craig Hartman.

The new 22-foot site-specific sculpture will be donated by the artist and unveiled outside the Consulate’s main entrance in 2013. This marks Shapiro’s second project with FAPE: in 1999 he installed a 40-feet-tall sculpture titled “Conjunction” at the enormous, fortress-like U.S. Embassy in Ottawa. Shapiro cautioned viewers who might see in the twisting, zigzagging sculpture intimations of a tortuous relationship between the U.S. and China.

“The State Department, with the assistance of FAPE, places abstract and challenging work in American embassies and consulates that serve the local population,” he  said Shapiro in a press release. “There is no political narrative other than the celebration of individual spirit, which I think is a quality that can find common ground and transcend cultural parameters. This is adventurous, lively, and in the end perhaps revelatory.”

Other artists who’ve created works for U.S. embassies and consulates as part of the FAPE program include Lynda Benglis, Louise Bourgeois, Ron Gorchov, Ellsworth Kelly, Sol LeWitt, and Maya Lin. The sculptor Martin Puryear is currently working on a major piece for another major new U.S. building in China: Its Beijing embassy. That project will be finished in 2015.

— Benjamin Sutton

(Image: Conceptual rendering of Joel Shapiro’s sculpture outside of the new U.S. Consulate in Guangzhou, China; Courtesy FAPE and the artist.)