Sun God is a statue by French sculptor Niki de Saint Phalle located on the campus of the University of California, San Diego. The statue is a 14-foot multicolored bird-like creature, perched atop a 15-foot-tall horseshoe-shaped rock pedestal.
Erected in February 1983 as a part of the Stuart Collection of public art projects, the fiberglass Sun God has become a unique feature on the UCSD campus. It is located on a grassy area between the Faculty Club and Mandeville Auditorium, on the eastern periphery of the John Muir College campus. Since the 1980s the UCSD Associated Students organization has sponsored an annual event, the Sun God Festival, with the statue as its official mascot. Over the years numerous visual-arts students have accessorized the statue with items such as sunglasses, a cap and gown, an ID card, a large, water-spraying phallus, and even a nest with eggs painted in the statue's trademark bright colors.
In the initial days when the statue was available, no college volunteered to use it, Muir College accepted it on its campus.
Famous quotes containing the words sun and/or god:
“No peevish winter wind shall chill
No sullen tropic sun shall wither
The roses in the rose-garden which is ours and ours only”
—T.S. (Thomas Stearns)
“One of the proud joys of the man of letters—if that man of letters is an artist—is to feel within himself the power to immortalize at will anything he chooses to immortalize. Insignificant though he may be, he is conscious of possessing a creative divinity. God creates lives; the man of imagination creates fictional lives which may make a profound and as it were more living impression on the world’s memory.”
—Edmond De Goncourt (1822–1896)