NEW YORK.- An exhibition of 19 sculptures by Tony Price (1937-2000), created from nuclear weapons salvage, will be on display at the United Nations through June 9th in the South Gallery of the General Assembly Visitors’ Lobby, located at 1st Avenue at 46th Street in New York. Gallery hours are Monday - Friday 9:30 – 4:30, Saturday & Sunday 10:00 – 4:30. This exhibition, originally displayed at the Museum of Fine Arts in Santa Fe, is being presented in conjunction with the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) review conference and the 60th anniversary of the UN and is supported by NPT member nations Sweden, Ireland, New Zealand, Mexico, South Africa, and Egypt, and by Governor and Mrs. Bill Richardson and the New Mexico Department of Cultural Affairs.

In the late 1960s, artist and counter-culture icon Tony Price settled in New Mexico and discovered the Zia Salvage Yard at the Los Alamos National Laboratory. He was inspired to use the detritus of the world’s most advanced nuclear weapons program to create an art that spoke to Man’s deeper instinct for peace. With grace and wit and brilliance he fashioned the forms of nuclear destruction into icons of peace in an eloquent appeal for sanity and survival. Out of the angry arsenals of terror, Price created weapons of mass salvation and he called them Atomic Art.

There is wit as well as prophecy in Price’s vision, and he uses irony as a way of slipping past our guard. His creative process connects Price to other artists of his generation, who also worked outside the mainstream to address its ills. A redemptive art, using recycled found objects, and appropriating the iconography and symbolism of native cultures and world religions, Price’s Atomic Art makes us smile, and it makes us think. It’s a potent combination.