Artist Creates Shattered Sculptures by Shipping Them in FedEx Boxes

From the FedEx works series, courtesy of Walead Beshty

Many sculpturists know the anxiety of traveling a work of art, hoping and praying that it won’t break on the way to its destination. But L.A.-based artist Walead Beshty found a way to embrace that problem.

Over the course of nine years, between 2005 and 2014, Beshty worked on his FedEx works sculpture series. For each sculpture, he designed a laminate glass box to fit perfectly inside a standard size FedEx shipping box. Then, he mailed the box to various art galleries and exhibitions across the country. When gallery workers removed the sculptures from the FedEx boxes, each had a unique pattern of cracks and breaks, due to the shipping process.

For Beshty, the meaning of the FedEx works series is twofold. First, Beshty found inspiration the fact that, evidently, FedEx has copyrighted the dimensions of their boxes. This, he says, essentially amounts to a company owning a shape.

FedEx boxes (various), 2008. Installation view, Signs of the Time, The Whitney Museum of American Art

“[The FedEx works series] initially interested me because they’re defined by a corporate entity in legal terms,” Beshty told Mikkel Carl in 2011. “There’s a copyright designating the design of each FedEx box, but there’s also the corporate ownership over that very shape…I considered this volume as my starting point; the perversity of a corporation owning a shape—not just the design of the object.”

In addition to the intriguing copyright issues, the cracks in each sculpture are unique by virtue of their travel experiences. Beshty’s sculptures symbolize how an object or entity can change in unique ways as it travels through space and time.

In the same interview as above, Beshty said, “Furthermore, I was interested in how art objects acquire meaning through their context and through travel… So, I wanted to make a work that was specifically organized around its traffic, becoming materially manifest through its movement from one place to another.”

Each of Beshty’s sculptures tells the story of how it came to be. Art belongs to its audience, and therefore there will always be endless interpretations. But the series is a testament to how something can endure hardships of its journey and emerge even more beautiful.