A giant stainless steel spoon holding a maraschino cherry is the most photographed object in Minneapolis — Spoonbridge and Cherry, the single image that says this city to anyone who has been here. Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen created Spoonbridge and Cherry in 1988 for the opening of the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden, the largest urban sculpture garden in the country outside of a museum, eleven acres of outdoor works set into a park that thousands of people walk through every day simply because it's there, between the Walker Art Center and Loring Park. Oldenburg and van Bruggen were masters of the monumental everyday object — their work transforms the familiar into the uncanny by making it impossible to ignore.
The spoon is twenty-nine feet tall. The cherry on top is seven feet across. Water sprays from the stem of the cherry into the reflecting pool below.
Stand here in July and you will see wedding photos, graduation photos, tourists from every country, kids climbing on the base, and joggers running past without looking up because they have seen it a thousand times. That's how you know a public artwork is working.