Artists

Judith Hopf

Press release

Leaf through any textbook of human civilization and sooner or later you’ll find the familiar diagram: a circle crossed with evenly spaced diagonal lines—the primitive wheel. In grandiose rhetoric, the book informs us that this is the invention from which humanity descends. The tire, in comparison, can seem like the wheel’s lesser cousin—a minor improvement, useful but nowhere near as groundbreaking. Without the creation of the pneumatic tire, however, our society’s staggering complexity would be unthinkable.