Tom Lloyd’s Light Sculptures Are a Form of Resistance

Artist Tom Lloyd (1929–1996) was an activist, teacher, and community organizer, as well as one of the trailblazers of a new mode of sculpture incorporating light and technology. One of the most innovative examples of his kinetic work, Veleuro, which brought together nearly 800 colored Christmas bulbs that go on and off according to a complex electrical system, is currently on view at MoMA after having recently entered the Museum’s collection. Curator Michelle Kuo and content producer Naeem Douglas recently sat down with independent conservator Reinhard Bek to talk about the multiyear effort to preserve Lloyd’s vision, and give it a future life.

Tom Lloyd. Veleuro. 1968

Naeem Douglas: When did your relationship with Tom Lloyd’s work begin?

Reinhard Bek: My relationship with the work started about eight years ago, when the Studio Museum contacted us regarding their two Lloyd pieces. The 1968 inaugural exhibition at the Studio Museum was with Tom Lloyd, so the museum has a very strong relationship with the artist. We started a conversation in 2018 with Lloyd’s collaborator, the engineer Alan Sussman, who unfortunately passed away two years ago. That interview was really the beginning of my research into the technical art history of Lloyd, and his relationship to Sussman, and then to RCA [Radio Corporation of America], the big corporation which actually fabricated all of the light pieces.

Lloyd used to make static assemblages, wall-hanging sculptures, from found metal works, mechanical things like metal wheels, and hands from clocks. He used to show them at an outdoor exhibit down at Washington Square Park. And this is where he met Sussman.

Michelle Kuo: That’s what happens in Washington Square Park.
[Laughter]

RB: Really, it’s crazy. Alan Sussman, a white, trained PhD scientist working on the early development of liquid crystal displays (LCDs) approaches this academically trained Black artist, and the two start talking, and become friends, and go to shows. At some point, Lloyd approached Sussman about wanting to do something with light. And then the two started creating these light artworks. We don’t know exactly how it all started, but what we know is that Lloyd designed the minimal, geometric pieces. Sussman took the designs to RCA and Lloyd worked with them to manufacture the light sculptures, including their control boxes. It was up to Lloyd to make the final decisions on programming the light sequencing, and the distribution and the colors of the lights.

Tom Lloyd’s Veleuro (1968) in Bek & Frohnert’s conservation facilities, 2022

ND: What can you tell me about the piece that MoMA has, Veleuro? That’s one of his biggest, right?

RB: Yes, one of the largest. Lloyd always picked the title from racehorses. Veleuro has a total of 780 light bulbs.

MK: Originally Christmas bulbs.

RB: Christmas bulbs, exactly: red, green, blue, and red. And so they go on and off in sequence, but they’re also connected to each other in circuits. And the light sequence is symmetric. But Veleuro has this additional feature, quite complex. It turns back and forth between two different sequences. One is asymmetric, and one is symmetric. They go back and forth every two and a half minutes so it’s never the same thing. It is mathematically, but we do not recognize the same pattern.

MK: It’s like phase shifts in music, and minimalist music as well.

RB: That’s beautiful. I love that.

MK: I think it’s very related actually, because it’s made at the same time that musicians like Steve Reich and others are experimenting with set patterns. As it repeats, it gets out of sync with itself, or out of phase, and then it gives rise to disorder and unpredictability.

Multiple still images converted to a GIF to elucidate light patterns in Veleuro

RB: Yeah, exactly. This is the only one of his works which has this kind of feature.

MK: Veleuro is an example of a work that was revolutionary for its time, because it had motion; and something emanating from it, a glow, as well as having this mechanical, near-computational or algorithmic device attached to it. It’s part of this ethos around thinking that an art object is not just a static thing hanging on the wall, but something that changes, and might even have electrical circuits, or other kinds of energy flows, running through it, like a light bulb. There was a whole light art movement that artists were active in at the time. But Lloyd is singular because he was also an ardent activist, and he saw his work, which was this abstract, colorful, and technological, as part of an effort to overturn the entire social system which he was agitating against.

Tom Lloyd and apprentices in the artist’s studio in Jamaica, Queens, c.1968.

ND: And the expectations of what a Black artist should produce.

MK: Yes. At the time, there was a lot of pressure for artists who were active in the Civil Rights movement and/or the Black Power movement, as Tom Lloyd was, to create figurative art or posters, slogans, Social Realism, things that depicted actual recognizable people or scenes or places, and as an activist tool—agitprop. And Lloyd, instead, decided to make something that’s abstract, that doesn’t refer to anything. And yet he thinks it’s going to potentially change your perception, and therefore change the way that you relate to other people in the world.

At the same time that Lloyd is calling for museums to be radically overturned, and change what they’re doing, he also is part of an art and technology movement in the ’60s that is new and strange—it’s not every day that someone could walk into a huge technological corporation like RCA and say, let’s collaborate with an artist. And Lloyd is part of that incredible history as well.

Lloyd was also the first artist to be part of the Studio Museum project where students and apprentices, organized by the Studio Museum, would help an artist actually put together some of his sculptures, and learn about these engineering and technical elements. So there’s also a whole community history.

RB: He was such an interesting figure. There are beautiful photographs of the assembly of Veleuro in Lloyd’s studio. A wood stove, and a working bench, and then his young students. And they’re all sitting there with Lloyd, and soldering, and screwing in light bulbs. He was an educator, he was an activist, and he was an artist.

Veleuro in Bek & Frohnert’s conservation facilities, 2022

ND: Can you tell us about the conservation work you did on this?

RB: For the longest time, Veleuro lived in the apartment of a collecting family. It was the only work which we know Lloyd installed himself. And the reason why that’s important is that he hid the control box, and all the cables. Meaning he did not want all the ugly apparatus, the technology, to show.

Working on a piece like Veleuro is very different to conserving a painting or a traditional sculpture. Usually Lloyd’s works have two main conservation issues: one is the light bulbs, and the other is actually the code, the program, the sequence. The light units are fine. They’re highly professional, made to last by RCA.

MK: But there was a big nest of wires…

RB: Oh my God, yes. What we needed to do was get the original work back fully functional so the light sculpture works, the control box works. And then we digitize the code, the sequence in the control box. And from this digital file, our electronic engineer Mike Schmidt who is working with us on this creates a new digital box. Interestingly, a lot of the light bulbs were actually original, made by GE, General Electric, in the ’60s.

ND: And they still work?

RB: Yes. They have a ceramic coating inside, and that ceramic coating does not age.

MK: That’s incredible.

RB: So we know that the colors we see in these original incandescent Christmas bulbs are actually pretty true to what the artist saw in the ’60s. 780 incandescent light bulbs is a huge amount of energy, of electricity. It would blow most fuses and be a fire hazard. And these works became so hot that the lenses started to deform. So that doesn’t work anymore. But today we have LED technology. LEDs, based on a diode, are a completely different technology than incandescent light bulbs, which is based on the tungsten wire. So we tried to replicate the chromacity and the luminescence of these original light bulbs. It took many years.

MK: We started before the pandemic. But trying to get custom light bulbs even sent to Reinhard’s studio was a supply chain issue.

RB: We even had custom-made light bulbs made in Hong Kong. So now, only recently, we found LED light bulbs that are surprisingly close to the original. We were so happy. We could actually reduce the power consumption by 90%, and it’s not even getting hot anymore.

The amazing thing about the aesthetics of Veleuro is that it seems timeless. Absolutely timeless. I’m stunned.

MK: Right now, it just so happens that we have this incredible work by Lloyd up at the same time as contemporary work by Rafaël Rozendaal, whose works are digital art pieces based on very, very, very simple computer programs, generative algorithms. And those are, in a way, analogous to what Lloyd was playing with in the ’60s, thinking about these very simple codes that would then generate something that is greater than the sum of its parts.

Conservator Reinhard Bek at work on Veleuro in Bek & Frohnert’s conservation facilities, 2022

Hyundai Card First Look: Tom Lloyd is on view at MoMA through spring 2025.