In the mid-1980s, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota, commissioned a piece of work from married couple Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen, whose first artistic collaboration had come in 1976.

[2][3] An early concept for the sculpture was a Viking ship with a dragon figurehead set in a circular reflecting pool; a 1986 article in the Star Tribune describes this vision as having been "quickly abandoned".

[1] Walker curator Siri Engberg said in 2013 that the bowl of the spoon was associated with "the prow of a Viking ship, a duck rising out of the water, various flora and fauna, [and] ice skating" for Oldenburg and van Bruggen.

[5] Martin Friedman, director of the Walker, said of the work that the artists did not intend to craft a "sculptural symbol of Minneapolis" but that he believed Spoonbridge and Cherry would "be a landmark and [would] give a lot of people pleasure".

"[12] Writing in the Star Tribune a year after the Sculpture Garden's opening, Chris Waddington found the linden seed pond critical to enjoying Spoonbridge, writing that in winter months when the pond was frozen and snowed over, the sculpture "can seem like a soulless mock-up, a quirky idea that lost its charm somewhere between the artist's hand and the factory where it was built; but with spring comes the fountain's spray, the pool's play of liquid reflections on steel and an animate charge that recalls the poetry of the artists' original sketches.