If you ever travel to Minneapolis, make sure you visit the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden. Originally known as the Armory Gardens in the early 1900s, the location was opened as the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden in 1988. Arguably the most distinctive work in the park is the Spoonbridge and Cherrya giant model of a spoon with a cherry perched delicately on its tip. Now known as an iconic representation of the city, the water sculpture was designed by the innovative art team of Claes Oldenburg and his wife Coosje van Bruggen.Spoonbridge and Cherry is hardly Oldenburg’s only public art project, but it is a good example of his signature style of large replicas of everyday objects. Oldenburg was born in Stockholm, Sweden, but his diplomat father was transferred to Chicago, where Oldenburg spent most of his childhood. He attended Yale University from 1946 to 1950 and then took courses at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He opened his own art studio while working as a reporter for Chicago’s City News Bureau. It was in New York City, however, that he became involved with artists like Jim Dine, Red Grooms, and Allan Kaprow, who were then staging their iconic Happeningsa new specialized version of performance art.Oldenburg started out by creating his own happenings as well as several “soft sculptures,” such as aa lipstick sculpture which would deflate unless the viewer pumped air into it. Starting in the 1970s, Oldenburg has worked primarily in large-scale sculpture, especially after his marriage to Coosje van Bruggen in 1976. Van Bruggen was a perfect partner for Oldenburgshe studied art history at the University of Groningen and worked at Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum and then Enschede’s Academy for Art and Industries before moving to New York in 1973.The artistic medium of sculpture is very different from that of anonymous graffiti artists like Banksy or wheatpasters like Tacoma’s Beautiful Angle, but Oldenburg and van Bruggen has a similar fascination with pop culture and the boundaries of art. Most of his work cannot be truly understood until you give up on taking it entirely seriously. His work Free Stamp, commissioned in 1985 by Standard Oil of Ohio and located in Cleveland’s Willard Park, is known as the world’s largest rubber stamp. Whether it’s a political or corporate message is up to the viewerperhaps it’s just a really big stamp.Other well-known projects include the Crusoe Umbrella (1979) in Nollen Park, Des Moines, Iowa and a Clothespin (1976) sculpture in front of Philadelphia City Hall. In 2001, Oldenburg and van Bruggen created the Dropped Cone sculpture, depicting an upside-down ice cream cone, on top of a shopping center in Cologne, Germany. However, Oldenburg’s zaniest artwork is also his least consistent. In 1969, he contributed a drawing that was etched onto the Moon Museum, a ceramic wafer attached to the leg of the Intrepid landing module. The Moon Museum was supposedly left on the moon during the Apollo 12 mission.