Yale's Whimsical Lipstick Sculpture Gets Revamped and Relocated
In 1968, a group of Yale students and faculty formed the Colossal Keepsake Corporation to create a public sculpture on campus. They approached Claes Oldenburg, a Swedish-American Pop artist and Yale alumnus, who designed a gigantic tube of orange-colored lipstick set on caterpillar tracks.
The corporation raised $5,000 in donations to cover the materials needed for the sculpture. Lippincott, Inc., a North Haven-based company that had helped artists build large-scale public sculptures since 1966, fabricated the components at cost.
On May 15, 1969, Oldenburg and the students installed the piece, 'Lipstick (Ascending) on Caterpillar Tracks,' as a surprise gift to Yale University. It stood on Beinecke Plaza for about a year before being removed by the artist.
In 1974, a refurbished version of the sculpture returned to campus as a gift to the Yale University Art Gallery and was installed in Morse College's courtyard, one of Yale's residential colleges, where it remained for most of the next half century.