World's Largest Shuttlecocks

Kansas City, Missouri

In 1994 Swedish-American sculptor Claes Oldenburg and his wife, Coosje van Bruggen, were commissioned to create an artwork for the grounds of Kansas City's Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art. The story goes that the pair were trying to think of something Midwestern, and hit upon the feathered headdresses of Plains Indian chiefs.

Instead of sculpting a big Indian, Claes and Coosje created four feathered badminton shuttlecocks, each 19 feet long, and scattered them across the museum's south lawn, as if a race of giants had finished their game and forgotten to pick up after themselves.

Local letters to the editor decried the big birdies as "not art" and "a giant waste." But over time Kansas City -- a culturally conservative town -- grew to embrace the shuttlecocks as a civic symbol. Today its tastemakers credit Claes and Coosje with bringing the idea of big, fun, public sculpture to Kansas City, apparently unaware that the city has had a giant penguin and kangaroo since the 1960s.