She Who Must Be Obeyed

She Who Must Be Obeyed is a minimalist sculpture wide and deep made by Tony Smith in 1975. It is located at the Frances Perkins Building, in downtown Washington, D.C. The piece consists of nine geometric rhomboid units, bolted and welded together and painted blue. Tony Smith's career encompassed architecture, painting, and sculpture. The General Services Administration commissioned the high steel construction that is painted blue in 1974 for its Art in Public Places program. Smith said that he was willing to forgo the standard honorarium for the sculpture. "I felt very honored to do something in the national capital...As far as I was concerned, I would be perfectly willing to supply it at cost….it’s right near the Capitol, and it’s a very nice place to be." The $98,000 fee he was awarded was consumed by the production of the imposing work. Description During the spring of 1976 She Who Must Be Obeyed was installed on the east plaza of the newly constructed Department of Labor building—subsequently named the Frances Perkins Building—in Washington, D.C., not far from the east wing of the National Gallery of Art. Using the jargon of a master builder, which he had been, Smith explained that his sculpture “is the cross-section of a space frame made up of tetrahedral and octahedral. It’s called simply a rhombus.”