James Franklin Love was born in Amarillo, Texas, in 1927. In 1948 he enrolled at Baylor University on the GI bill. During his last semester, Love took a theater class which ignited a love for the arts. Although his degree was in business administration, when Love moved to Houston he instead began working in theatrical lighting and set design. It was while constructing the set for The Glass Menagerie at the Alley Theatre that he learned to weld. Soon after taking a job as a technician for the Contemporary Arts Association in 1956, Love exhibited his first sculptures—hieroglyphic screens made from cut scrap steel. By the end of the decade, Love was constructing small whimsical sculptures of birds, human figures, and flower bouquets assembled from machine parts, tools, and scraps of steel.
In the 1970s and ’80s, Love began experimenting with small sculptures, narrative and anecdotal tableaux, and a series of what he called “almost useful objects,” such as bowties and jacks. In the 1990s he began to mix and meld newly fabricated steel with found materials and scrap metal. Although his materials and methods continue to evolve, the elegant abstract geometry of his work gives it a quality of timelessness.
Can Johnny Come Out and Play? is a cast-bronze sphere, almost 9 feet in diameter, commissioned by the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, for the Lillie and Hugh Roy Cullen Sculpture Garden. The seemingly mundane form of a sphere, though giant in scale, is quietly placed in a corner of the garden and seems essentially benign. But closer inspection discloses a dark, blotchy, distressed surface which—when juxtaposed with its playful title—suggests a series of ambiguous meanings. To some, the colossal ball might be viewed as a child would see the huge and intimidating world of adults. For others, the rough surface looks something like a cratered meteor or the planet earth. Its planetary size and form could also allude to the global political power plays contending in the world. Perhaps the work is actually a toy globe for giants of the cosmos to play with!
In 1990 Love was the first Texas artist to receive a commission to create a sculpture for the recently opened Cullen Sculpture Garden. He decided to depart from his style of mostly representational assembled steel sculptures and create a piece that would respond to the more abstract sculptures already existing in the garden. Dr. Peter C. Marzio, the director of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, explained Love’s thinking in a 1990 Houston Chronicle article: “...in his mind, the garden is like a surrealist landscape, so he just walked in my office one day with the idea of plunking this huge ball in it.”
After deciding to make his sculpture in the shape of a sphere, Love constructed a full-scale fiberglass model. He then physically rolled the model around the sculpture garden to determine the best installation site for the finished piece. Can Johnny Come Out and Play? Lies in a grassy patch in the northwest corner of the garden.
