George Warren Rickey (June 6, 1907 – July 17, 2002) was an American kinetic sculptor known for geometric abstractions, often large-scale, engineered to move in response to air currents.

[1] Growing up with a father who was an engineer and a grandfather who was a clockmaker instilled in the young Rickey an interest in mechanical systems and anything needing winding or cranking, from the family car to the phonograph.

As did his youthful interest in engineering, Rickey’s familiarity with boat movements from an early age would inform the signature kinectic sculpture he began developing in the 1950s.

[citation needed] After leaving Groton, Rickey taught at various schools throughout the country as part of the Carnegie Corporation Visiting Artists/Artists in Residence program (partially funded by the Works Progress Administration).

Rickey combined his love of engineering and mechanics by designing sculptures whose metal parts moved in response to the slightest air currents.

The Museum of Modern Art, in New York purchased his Two Lines Temporal I, after Alfred Barr, MOMA's then director, had seen it at the exhibition Documenta III in Kassel, Germany.

Rickey mastered not only ordered predictable movements, but also mastered methods of controlling both the speed and tempo of similar objects to respond more randomly, such as in his work Four Open Rectangles Diagonal Jointed Gyratory V.[7] Much of his work was created in his studio in East Chatham, New York, where he moved after taking a position as a professor of art (sculpture) at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York.

In Rickey's words the city was like a "cocoon" in the middle of communist East Germany, with a lively and advanced social and cultural life which he partook in fully.

One of the stories he told concerned how, as a result of a World War II-era, government-administered aptitude test, he was assigned to design machine gun turrets for bombers.