Visiting artist-in residence George Smith, a Rice University Professor of Sculpture, created Kindred Spirits at the University of Vermont during the 1990-91 academic year. Sited at the entrance to the Robert Hull Fleming Museum, these two black welded steel conical shapes reflect the artist's interests in merging references to both the architectural and sculptural traditions of the Dogon culture in Africa and the traditions of Late Modernist minimal sculpture found in the work of American sculptors Tony Smith and David Smith. The title --Kindred Spirits-- refers both to the nineteenth-century painting by that name (1841/NYPublic Library) by A.B.Durand, a painting which depicts artist Thomas Cole and writer William Cullen Bryant in the Catskills as the pre-eminent painter and poet of the American landscape; and to the affinity which Smith has for both African and Western cultures. For more information see the exhibition catalogue, George Smith, Sculpture and Drawings. Robert Hull Fleming Museum,1999.