George Rickey was a creator of precisely engineered kinetic sculpture. He was born in South Bend, Indiana, and when age six, was taken to Scotland in 1913. He studied at the Ruskin School of Drawing, Oxford, in 1928-29, earning a B.A. in art history and in 1941, an M.A. from that school. He also studied with Andre Lhote in Paris in 1929. He returned to America in 1930 but continued to travel abroad.

Rickey took up sculpture later in his career. From 1930 until the late 40s, he was a fresco and mural painter, and also a teacher with positions at The Groton School in Massachusetts in the 1930s, and at Muhlenberg College in Allentown, Pennsylvania, where he chaired the art department from 1941 to 1948. In 1945, he completed his first mobile when he was serving in the Air Force, and in 1949, he began glass kinetic works, after which he experimented with a variety of materials. Stainless steel became his preferred medium.

Around 1959 he began to simplify forms, working with thin blades in vertical and horizontal configurations driven by wind rather by mechanical means. Of these works, both freestanding and suspended, he has said: "I have worked for several years with the simple movement of straight lines, as they cut each other, slice the intervening space, and divide time, responding to the greatest air currents." (Baigell 301)

George Rickey lived and worked in East Chatham, New York. He was the author of, Constructivism: Origins and Evolution (1967).