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The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Missouri is home to a popular outdoor
sculpture by Claes Oldenburg. Shuttlecocks (1994) is an installation of four of these pieces
from the game of badminton, in large scale (over 17 feet high), that sit in different
positions of the museum’s grounds.
Though I have never been to the Nelson-Atkins Museum, the photos of this piece and
descriptions I have read about it make it easy to imagine what it is like in person. I’ve
always heard them called “birdies", so the word “shuttlecock" is new to me. Since these
pieces from the classic lawn game, traditionally made of feathers attached to a cork to
form a cone shape, will fit in the palm of your hand, the larger than life installation on the
lawn of the museum is quite an unexpected and interesting sight.
The lawn surrounding the neoclassical faade of the museum is vast and imposing. It is easy
to imagine, at first glance of the giant shuttlecocks, that one has stepped onto the game
court of giants. The museum building itself, being the net that divides the field.
Standing just over five and a half feet tall, the pieces of this sculpture are about three times
my height. Would they make me feel uncomfortable and endangered? I think they might, if
only momentarily. It would be easy to let my imagination place me in the world of these
giants, or perhaps that I had been shrunken into a tiny insect or being, navigating the world
that belongs to those much larger than myself. Maybe one of them might approach any
