Since 1982, the sculpture known as "Dance Door" has been situated in the forecourt of the Music Center in downtown Los Angeles. The work itself was created in 1978 and formerly was near the swimming pool at the Beverly Hills home of Frederick Weisman, a noted art collector, who commissioned the work from sculptor Robert Graham. Weisman donated the work to the Music Center in commemoration of the Joffrey Ballet's affiliation with the Music Center Group (The Joffrey Ballet left the Music Center Group in 1991). The work is only one element in the totality of the forecourt, and the various pieces have been added at different times for different reasons so that there is no central plan to the location except to express some artistic integrity in the pieces chosen and in the way they are placed. This is a well-traversed public space, and people interact in different ways with the pieces that make up the public art in this open square.
Robert Graham was born in 1938 in Mexico City, moving at age 10 to San Jose, California. He received his B.A. from San Jose State in 1963 and a degree from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1964. He set to work in the art world and achieved notoriety in pop art circles by making small wax nude figures in plexiglas boxes. In the early 1970s he started casting anatomically accurate and detailed female nudes in bronze, and this distinctively realistic quality can be seen in the figures of the Olympic Gateway and the four nudes he cast for fountains inside the atrium of the Wells Fargo Center and for the work called "Prime Source" at the top of the Library Steps, also in downtown Los Angeles. His works have been widely exhibited in numerous one man and group exhibitions and are in the collections of many museums, including the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney in New York City, the Hirschhorn Museum in Washington, D.C., the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, ...