Horseplay Horses Aiken Icons
By Nancy Johnson Photograohy by Shelly Schmidt & Gary Knoll
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list of Aiken’s most iconic features would surely include the Hitchcock Woods, Hopeland Gardens, the canopy of live oaks on South Boundary, The Willcox, and, of course, the colorful assortment of painted horses scattered about town. But, unless you have lived in Aiken for some time, you may not know the story behind these life-size fiberglass horses, an incredible project called Horseplay. “I love that there is still interest in Horseplay!” Anne Campbell says of the fundraising project, which spanned fall 2002 to spring 2004. Anne was the honorary chairperson of Horseplay and an enthusiastic promoter. “It was a great project and a very successful endeavor that certainly has brought the town of Aiken a lot of pleasure over all these years.”
Inspired by Saratoga Horses
Anne says the inspiration for Horseplay came from the painted fiberglass horse statues that adorn the city of Saratoga Springs, New York. Anne and her late husband Cot Campbell, who was the president of the horse racing syndicate Dogwood Stable, spent time in Saratoga every summer. “When I first saw the horses out in the street I thought, oh my gosh, this is an idea whose time has come for Aiken. We have the parkways, of course, and so much traffic downtown,” she says. “There were lots of places to put them where pedestrian traffic would see and enjoy them.” She notes that other equestrian locales such as Lexington, Kentucky and Ocala, Florida have hosted similar projects where artists were engaged to paint fiberglass horses that are displayed around the town. Anne’s first step was to enlist Bill Reynolds as the steering committee chairman. Although fairly new to Aiken at the time, Bill, a retired businessman and a board member of the Aiken Center for the Arts,
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The Aiken Horse
was already known for getting things done. “I was the mastermind and visionary, but Bill handled the logistics and did all the work,” says Anne. “First, we put together a committee, then talked to the mayor and got approval.”
Step by Step
“Anne told me about her idea for the project and how the concept was popular at the time; she thought it could be a successful fundraiser in Aiken,” Bill says. “We got the Aiken Center for the Arts (ACA) and United Way together in collaboration and told them we honestly did not know what it would be, but we were willing to give it a try.” It was agreed that Horseplay would be created to promote the arts in Aiken and that the proceeds would be used to set up a scholarship fund at ACA to subsidize art classes for seniors. “We started out strictly as a trial balloon. We bought one of the fiberglass horses completely blank, brought it in and had some USC Aiken students paint it, creating our prototype,” Bill explains. They displayed the painted horse at the ACA and invited potential sponsors to see it and to hear about the concept. The idea was to recruit local businesses to sponsor the cost of a blank fiberglass horse, hire a local artist to paint it, and then sell all the horses at a gala auction. “We didn’t know if we’d sell five of them or maybe ten, but it ended up that it was such a great concept, we got 30 sponsors at $3,000 a horse,” Bill says. Most of the sponsors were businesses, but a few individuals also stepped up to the plate. Bill says that this initial part of the project, all the research, creating the prototype, and securing sponsors, took about a year.
Artists Get On Board
The next step was procuring the horses and having them painted. Thirty blank fiberglass horses were ordered from a company in New Mexico.
October-November 2020
