Alexander Calder (July 22, 1898 – November 11, 1976), also known as Sandy Calder

 American sculptor and artist most famous for inventing the mobile. 
 Alexander Calder also created paintings, lithographs, and tapestry and designed carpets.

Born in Lawnton, Pennsylvania, on July 22, 1898, Calder came from a family of artists.
In 1909, when Calder was in the fourth grade, he sculpted a dog and a duck out of sheet brass as Christmas gifts for his parents. The sculptures were three dimensional and the duck was kinetic because it rocked when gently tapped. These sculptures are frequently cited as early examples of Calder’s skill.
In Croton, during his early high school years, Calder was befriended by the painter Everett Shinn with whom he built a gravity powered system of mechanical trains.
In 1915, Calder decided to study mechanical engineering after learning about the discipline from a classmate.
For several years, he worked a variety of engineering jobs, including working as an assistant to a hydraulics engineer and engineer in a Canadian logging camp, but he was not content in any of the roles.
In June 1922, Calder started work as a fireman in the boiler room of the passenger ship H. F. Alexander. While the ship sailed from San Francisco to New York City, Calder woke on deck off the Guatemalan Coast and witnessed both the sun rising and the moon setting on opposite horizons. Calder called this experience an "inspirational vision" and he continued to refer to it throughout his life. .
Having decided to become an artist, Calder moved to New York and enrolled at the Art Students' League. While a student, he worked for the National Police Gazette which landed him a job working with Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey Circus. Calder became fascinated with the circus, sketching a number of studies on circus themes and sculpting a number of wire frame circus animals and carnival performers. Upon graduating, Calder moved to Paris to continue his studies in art. He took his wire model circus with him and gave elaborately improvised shows recreating the performance of a real circus. Soon, his "Cirque Calder" (now on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art) became popular with the Parisian avant-garde, and Calder began charging an entrance fee to see his two hour show of a circus that he could pack into a suitcase.
In 1928, Calder held his first solo show at a commercial gallery at the Weyhe Gallery in New York City. In 1934, he had his first solo museum exhibition in the United States at The Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago.
He spent much of the next decade criss-crossing the Atlantic to give shows in Europe and America. On one transatlantic steamer, he met his wife, Louisa James, grandniece of author Henry James and philosopher William James. They married in 1931.
While in Paris, Calder met and became friends with a number of avant-garde artists, including Joan Miró, Jean Arp, and Marcel Duchamp. A visit to Piet Mondrian's studio in 1930 "shocked" him into embracing abstract art.
The Cirque Calder can be seen as the start of Calder's interest in both wire sculpture and kinetic art. He maintained a sharp eye with respect to the engineering balance of the sculptures and utilized these to develop the kinetic sculptures Duchamp would ultimately dub as "'mobiles". He designed some of the characters in the circus to perform suspended from a thread. However, it was the mixture of his experiments to develop purely abstract sculpture following his visit with Mondrian that lead to his first truly kinetic sculptures, manipulated by means of cranks and pulleys.
By the end of 1931, he had quickly moved on to more delicate sculptures which derived their motion from the air currents in the room. From this, Calder's true "mobiles" were born. At the same time, Calder was also experimenting with self-supporting, static, abstract sculptures, dubbed "stabiles" by Arp to differentiate them from mobiles.
Calder and Louisa returned to America in 1933 to settle in a farmhouse they purchased in Roxbury, Connecticut, where they raised a family (first daughter, Sandra born 1935, second daughter, Mary, in 1939). Calder continued to give "Cirque Calder" performances but also worked with Martha Graham, designing stage sets for her ballets with Erik Satie.
During the World War II, Calder attempted to join up as a marine but was rejected. Instead, he continued to sculpt, but a scarcity of metal lead to him producing work in carved wood. After the war, Calder held several major retrospective exhibitions, including one in the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1943.
Calder was one of 250 sculptors who exhibited in the 3rd Sculpture International held at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in the summer of 1949. His mobile, International Mobile was the centerpiece of the exhibition and hangs in 2006 where it was placed in 1949.
n the 1950s, Calder increasingly concentrated his efforts on producing monumental sculptures. Notable examples are ".125" for JFK Airport in 1957 and "La Spirale" for UNESCO in Paris 1958. Calder's largest sculpture, at 20.5 m high, was "El Sol Rojo", constructed for the Olympic games in Mexico City.
In 1966, Calder published his Autobiography with Pictures with the help of his son-in-law, Jean Davidson.
In June 1969, Calder attended the dedication of his monumental stabile “La Grande Vitesse” located in the city of Grand Rapids, Michigan. This sculpture is notable for being the first public work of art in the United States to be funded with federal monies; acquired with funds granted from the then new National Endowment for the Arts under its “Art for Public Places” program.
In 1973, Calder was commissioned by Braniff International Airways to paint a full-size DC-8-62 as a "flying canvas", In 1975, Calder completed a second plane, this time a Boeing 727-227, as a tribute to the U.S. Bicentennial.
Calder died on November 11, 1976, shortly following the opening of another major retrospective show at the Whitney Museum in New York. Calder had been working on a third plane, entitled Tribute to Mexico, when he died.
On January 10, 1977, Calder was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the United States' highest civilian honor, by President Gerald Ford.

From wikipedia