Open End (sculpture)
abstract public art sculpture by Clement Meadmore
Open End is an abstract public art sculpture by Clement Meadmore. The 11-foot-high (3.4 m), 5-short-ton (4.5 t) curved metal beam is located on the grounds of St. Xavier High School in Springfield Township, Hamilton County, Ohio, United States. It was previously located in downtown Cincinnati.
Description
Open End rises out of the ground, bends 90 degrees to run along the horizontal plane, folds back on itself to run in the opposite direction, gently bends to the left while rotating slightly counterclockwise, folds again, and slopes downward toward the pedestal before curling back to point in the same direction as the second fold.
History
In 1984, Linclay Corporation commissioned Meadmore to design a sculpture for the three-story, brick plaza at the corner of Sixth and Vine Streets, in front of the Cincinnati Commerce Center that Linclay was developing. The Commerce Center, later known as the Convergys Center, was one of several International Style office towers that went up that year. The hollow bronze and steel sculpture was manufactured for $100,000 by the Tallix Foundry in Beacon, New York, and dedicated in August 1984.
Downtown passersby expressed puzzlement at Open End. Meadmore intended the work as "a bridge between the scale of the pedestrians and that of the building".
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Open End (sculpture)” is abstract public art sculpture by Clement Meadmore. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through sculpture, abstract and public, not as a finished interpretation.
Why this record matters
The phrase “abstract public art sculpture by Clement Meadmore” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.
Object files, edition statements, performance records and contemporary criticism preserve different stages of the work’s history. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 27, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q16016547. Authority coordinates are 39.208, -84.505. 1 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1984.
Rights, attribution and provenance may remain disputed even when a general reference summary presents a stable account. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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Three-step research path
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Questions for further research
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This entry incorporates text from “Open End (sculpture)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.