Enter a new sphere at exhibit
Joanne Silver - Boston Herald
"Have you seen my ball?" The perennial question of kids at play now resonates throughout the halls of the DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park in Lincoln, where it serves as the title of an enormous wall installation by Danny O.

O's agglomeration of balls on 129 painted wooden panels ascends alongside the museum's monumental, glassed-in staircase. From outside the building, the dots made by hundreds of balls retrieved from streets and railroad tracks coalesce pointillist-style in the image of a youth in shorts and a T-shirt.

But O's piece is just the beginning. Balls surface everywhere ; on the walls, the floor, the ceiling, nestled in the snow, dangling high above another set of steps.

The littlest ones are exquisite marbles displayed in an old-fashioned case. The biggest are Michael Shaughnessy's orb of hay, 8 feet across and fragrant as a farm, and Leah De Prizion's 9-foot lace papier-mache "Global Dance."

They are static , for now. It's impossible to look at an exhibition of balls, though, without imagining them all starting to roll.

"On the Ball: The Sphere in Contemporary Sculpture," at the museum through March 14, capitalizes on all this potential energy in a show that is both fun and thought-provoking. Thirty artists from across the country, working in media from lint to cement, have created pieces based on this quintessence of geometric simplicity.