Public Art Review issue 09 - 1993 (fall/winter)

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PERCENT PROGRAlvlS/INDEPENDENT ARTISTS ,

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Percent for Art Variations on a Theme

Unsponsored Independent Public Artists

((Mapping the Terrain" Reviews Listings &More

Blair Bender MinneoporlS, MN

Metropolitan State University, 51. Paul. MN :::Ja::n::::e~I:::::L~o:':':fq~u-is-I-"::'M'::"o:"'::nk.::!o:"::to::':'S-t-ot-e-U-ni-ve-rs-it-y--MinneoporlS, MN Trafton Hall

February 1,1994 is Ihe nul deadline

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forthe program's Slide Registry, and several additional sites.

For onplication information, writet',to:

David Culver Southwest State University, Minneapolis, MN Marshall, MN Barbara Bradley Winona State UniversityMinneapolis, MN Stork Hall Robert Gehrk. fau Claire, WI David Hall : Bloo::.m: : in: .;!.9t:.: :.on:!. MN: :, .:. :. -_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ Northwest Tedmi(ol College Brad Jirka Aviation Fo(dity, Thief River Falls, MN Northfield, MN ::::::==.::::.:.--...:.:.==~~------

Minnesota State Am Boord, 432 Summit Avenue, Saint Paul, MN, 55102 orcal/ (612) 297-2603 or tol/-free 1-800-8MN-ARTS

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i-i,V\.Vi..Vi, Specializing il' Custom Photographic & Ele(~tronic Imaging NeWl Professional Color Service, Inc. 909 Hennepin Avenue South • Minneapolis, MN 55403 (612) 673-8900 • toll free (800) 332-7753

We aare about your image.

ANNOUNCING AN OPEN CALL FOR ARTISTS TWO UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA "PERCENT FOR ART IN PUBLIC PIACES"PROJ]ECTS:

An unmatched central resource for public arts coordinators, artists, architects, landscape architects , planners, developers, consultants, and educators. Includes: • Artist contract and proposal guidelines • Public art policy • Preservation issues • Procedures for implementing projects· Listings of public art resources ·Going Public is published by the ArtS Extension Service in coo peration with the Visual Arts Program of the National Endowment for the Arts. Softbound, illus. , 303pp. , $23.70. Call 413-545-2360 This is not a competition but a call for artists & collaborative teams of artists who would like to be considered to create a site specific piece of public artwork for the above departments' new buildings.

Previous experience in public art is not necessary to be considered for this project.

••• APPLICATION AND DEADLINE··· The deadline for submitting completed applications is4:30 PM December 1, 1993. To reques t application materials & for questions call Gjilgiin Karim at 625-9686_ or write to: Public Art on the Twin Cities Campus Open Call for Artists Frederick R . Weisman Art Museum 333 Eas t River Rd Minneapolis, MN 55455 The Uniycrsily or l\1inncSolll. il§ un equal opportunity cdu cn lor unci employer

···A project Adllliui slcl"cd by Ihe Weisll1ulI A,"t Muse um "lthc University of Minn eso tR•••

to

order.

Division of Continuing Uucation . University of Massac~usetts at Am~erst

FORWARD Heros of the Revolution: Joseph Greenberg, Jr., Louis I. Kahn, Hemry W. Sawyer III, Raymond Speiser, Benton Spruance, Michael von Moschzisker.

In 1959, a small group of Philadelphia citizens started a revolution. They didn ' t intend to start a revoluti on, they intended to address an urban architecture that was, in von Moschzisker' s word, "so austere, so drab." The proposal was a simple idea: set aside a small portion of the construction costs of public projects for the inclusion of artworks to embellish the otherwise empty architecture of the ti me. From thi s little-heralded beginning was born a movement that has overtaken the country and become the primary vehicle by which public art is fu nded in America.

In her book Public Art in. Philadelphia, Penny Balkin Bach details the fascinating story of the origi ns of the Percent-for-Art movement. The short version is this : Sculptor Joseph Greenberg, Jr. was li ving and working in Europe during the post-war rebuilding period. He became aware of efforts by European cities to incorporate art into the reconstruction effort. Upon his return to Philadelphia, he made contact with Benton Spruance and Raymond Speiser of the Artists ' Equity collective, who agreed to help advance the idea. They enli sted the support of the great architect, Louis Kahn.

Contacts with Michael vo n Moschzisker, then chairman of the Redevelopment Agency, and Henry W. Sawyer III, a member of the Philadelphi a City Council , resulted in the passage in 1959 of Percent-for-Art mandates by both of those agencies. That small spark smo ldered during the 1960s, with a smattering of cities, notably Baltimore and San Francisco adopting the concept. The movement gathered momentum in the 1970s and swept ac ross America in the las t decade. Dependi ng on who is co un ting, upwards of 300 cities, counties, states, and federal agencies have now adopted Percent-for-Art mandates . Thousands of works of public art have been commissioned since this fire was lit 34 years ago.

In this issue of Public Art Review, the hi story and c urrent iterati ons of Percent-for-Art are examined. Progra ms on the "cutting edge" of the movement are chron icled and several articles describe projects ini tiated by artists outside the percent process.

This exploration of Percent-for-Art is dedicated to the heroes of this revolution!

- Jerry Allen

Jerry Allen, editorial advisor for this issue, has been a public art administrator and consultant for the past 20 years .

PublicArlRevi Managing Editor: Bruce N. Wright Editorial Advisor: Jerry Allen Project Manager: Jack Becker Copy Editor: Jan Zita Grover Art Director, Design and Production: Shannon Brady Advertising Representatives : Amanda Degener & Jack Becker Editorial Advisor y Board: Amanda Degener, Regina Fla nagan, Patrice C lark Koel sch, Cathey Billian, Barbara Grygutis, Ki nji Akagawa, Cheryl Miller, Full er Cowles, C hri stine Podas- Larson, Mariann Joh nson, Gordon Thomas, Jerry Machalek, and Julie Marckel.

Published by FORECAST Public Artworks Managing Director: Paul a Justich FORECAST Board of Directors: Chery l Kartes, Ellen Valde, V ictoria Moore, Garth Rockcastle, Kit Wilson , Ta-Coumba Aiken , Laura Mi gliorino, Ellen Messer-Dav idow Printer: Ideal Printers, Inc.

CONTENTS FEATURES SPONSORED A Brief History of Percent-for-Art in America

by John Wetenhall ........................ ......... ... .. ..... ................ ......4 Percent-for-Art: Variations on a Theme

by Claire Wickersham ............................................................ 8 Public Art for the Ninties: Re-sharpening the Cutting Edge

by Mary Kilroy ................................ ...................................... 12 Mandate in Maine by Julie Silliman .................................... 15

UNSPONSORED Independent Public Artists Alchemist in Residence by Mark Frohman ....................... 16 The Gathering Place by David Skarjune ............................ 18 Art of Democracy by G. B. Veerman ................. ................ 20 Art and Coffee; and insurance, and religion, and .. .

by Rene Paul Barilleaux ...................................................... 22 Bridging Extremities by George Melrod ............................ 24 MAPPING THE TERRAIN: The New Public Art: Part II

by Suzanne Lacy ................................................ ................. 26

DEPARTMENTS REVIEWS Siah Armajani at Storm King by Robert Taplin ................. 34 Summer Harvest at the Hirsch Farm

by Robin Edgerton .......................................... .................... .36 Art in Public by Jeffrey Kastner ......................................... 37 Culture and Democracy by Patrice Clark Koelsch ............ 38 Public Art Works: The Arizona Models by Gary Amdahl. 39 The Once and Future Park by Gary Amdahl .................... 39 WORTHY OF NOTICE by Regina Flanagan ....................... 40 PUBLIC ARTICLES-Conserving Public Collections

by Robert Schultz ....................... ......................................... 43 LISTINGS Updates, Opportunities, Publications, and Events Edited by Jack Becker ......................................................... 44

Š 1993PublicArt Review(ISSN: 1040-2 1I x)ispubl ishedsem i-a nnuall y

by FORECAST Public Artworks , 2324 University Aven ue West, Suite 102, Sai nt Paul , Minnesota USA 551 14 Tel. (6 12) 641-1 128 . Annual subscription dues are U.S. $ 12 for USA, $ 16 for Canada, and $2 1 for foreign. Public Art Review is not responsible for unso licited materia l.

Please send SASE wi th material requirin g return . Op inions ex pressed and validity of information herein are the responsibi li ty of the author, not FORECAST, and FORECAST disclaims any li ab ility for any claims made by adverti sers and for im ages reproduced by advertisers.

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Support for Public Art Review comes from the National Endowment for the Arts and the McKnight Foundation. Additional fund ing for FORECAST is provided by the Cowles Media Foundation; General Mills ; James R. Thorpe Fou ndation; Jerome Foundation; Center for Arts Criticism; Marbrook Foundation; Arts & Econom ic Development Fund of the C ity of St. Paul ; Metropo li tan Regional Arts Council; and advertisers, subscribers and supporters of FORECAST. Thanks to Jerry Allen and Rita Roosevelt for their encourageme nt and ass istance with thi s issue.

For information about advertising, contact project manager Jack Becker at (6 12) 64 1- 11 28.

PUBLIC ART REVIEW

FALUWINTER 1993 3

Sponsored ercent-for-art programs, as the following collection of essays makes clear, are a major part of public art as we know it today. Public funding on a percent basis has been around longer than we may realize. Included in this survey are articles that identify historical sources for percent-for-art programing, changing trends, and cutting-edge programs (both urban and rural) across the country.

What this survey does not address, for lack of space and resources, are many issue that may become more critical in the 1990s as public artists, percent program administrators, and funders respond to the changing economic and social environment.

These issues include: the problem of ever-shrinking budgets, the on-going effect of percentfor-art programs on the overall development of public art, the impact of private sector sponsorship on the art work, and the increasingly dibilitating effect of a nation-wide lack of standards for artist submission, selection, and payment. Equally important are issues surrounding temporary projects (with their ow:n set of administrative demands beyond the usual publicart protocol); the increasing emphasis on diversity, collaboration, and "place making," and a continuing disdain for and confusion about art in public places.

To begin this discussion, PAR presents the following essays.

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A Brief History of Percent-far-Art in America b y

J

0

h n

Wetenhall

id you know that for a records depository the government spent over 4 percent of its construction budget on art? How about 2.75 percent for a law office? Or over 2 percent for a post office? And all the while, not a si ngle statute, law, or guideline coveri ng the commission was in place.

The year was 1927. The project: the Federal Triangle in W ashington, D.C. Two percent was set aside for sculpture to adorn the Deparment of the Post Office building; $280,000 for the Department of Justice; and John Russell Pope ' s National Archives was lavished with over 4 percent of its construction budget on art. I There is nothing particularly new about the U.S. government's allocati ng some of its construction budget on art. In the days of Beaux Arts architecture, when arc hitects designed pediments to be filled

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4 PUBLIC ART REVIEW FALUWINTER 1993

with allegory, architraves to be punctuated with reliefs, and pl azas to boast uplifting symbols perched high atop pedestals, art in architecture was considered de rigeur. And as a percentage of budget, govermnent offici als expected to spend far more on art than they do today .

As a matter of public policy, the percent-fo r-art concept dates back to the New Deal and the Treasury Department' s Section of Pai nting and Sculpture (established in 1934). The program set aside approximately I percent of a federal building's cost fo r artistic decoration . Artists were chosen by anonymous competition, although provi sions existed so that especial ly accompli shed artists could receive commissions directly.

The section differed fro m other New Deal art program s because it had nothing to do with welfare relief or " make-work" strategies. The program essentially continued the natio n' s practice of decorating its

public buildings but transferred the selection of artists from architects to separate committees of experts who administered competitions intended to encourage and publicize the development of American art. 2 Art purchased for federal buildings during the Roaring Twenties was regarded as an essential component of classical design, but during the Depression era, the Treasury Section established an expanded rationale for public art. Now, in addition to securing highquality art for public buildings, the section was committed to stimulating appreciation of art by the American people, and, through competitions, to offering little known artists a means of recognition.

In practice, the competitions often provided specific narrati ve themes to assure that the final work would please the local community, a practice that led juries to favor styles of "contemporary realism." In concentrating on recognizable, local themes, the section hoped to inspire an essentially "democratic" appreciation of fine art at the grass-roots level.

When national priorities were realigned by World War II, the section gradually lost impetus and officially disbanded in n943. Its practice of selecting artists through independent panels of experts rather than through project architects would not reappear in federal policy until the late 1960s. The broader percent-for-art concept, however, endured, becoming an increasingly attractive model once policy makers recognized the meager adornment of governmental buildings erected after World War II. Given the scarcity of post-war federal art commissions you might imagine that the percent-for-art guideline fell into disuse. On the contrary, officials understood the concept and purported to follow it, sometimes at an even higher percentage than the more celebrated one or half of one later used during the 1960s, '70s, and '80s. In testimony before the Commission of Fine Arts, recorded in its 1953 report onArt and Government, administrators from the General Services Administration (GSA, the federal agency responsible for buildings and supplies) described their "rule" that set aside 1.5 percent of each project' s appropriation for sculptural or mural decoration. In contrast to the frugal bureaucratic attitude of the times, GSA Administrator Jess Larson actually wanted to raise the limit, objecting to the 1.5 percent formula as "establishing a ceiling for expenditures for decoration, rather than a floor. " As for aesthetics, GSA policy considered art to be "functional decoration," such as "a mural painting which

immortalizes a portion of the history of the community in which the building stands, or work of sculpture which delights the eye and does not interfere with the general architectural scheme."3 Seeing art as decoratively subordinate to architecture and to perceived popular standards, GSA practice circumscribed artistic creativity and proved incapable of inspiring any significant use of art in governmental buildings.

In 1959, Philadelphia became the first city in the United States to approve an ordinance mandating a percentage of its building costs for art. The ordinance codified an existing policy of the Philadelphia Redevelopment Authority that, since the late 1950s, had included a clause in contracts for rehabilitation projects that required no less than 1 percent of the construction budget to be allocated for art. The contract allowed a broad interpretation of "fine arts;" in addition to sculpture and murals, "fine arts" included such amenities as fountains, textured walls, mosaics, pools, tiled columns, patterned pavement, grillwork, and other ornamentation. According to its originator, Michael von Moschzisker, Chairman of the Redevelopment Authority, the program endowed public spaces with particular identities, as did such Philadelphia landmarks as the bronze eagle in Wanamaker's store and the billy goat in Rittenhouse Square. 4 Von Moschzisker' s percent-for-art requirement was neither a special interest hand-out to artists nor a subsidy for modem art but a public interest program to accentuate the distinctiveness of downtown Philadelphia.

The municipal ordinance, established through the lobbying efforts of the local Artists Equity Association, extended the percent-for-art requirement to structures as diverse as offices, bridges, and city gates.

Standards for categories of art included reliefs, stained glass, and fountains as well as murals and sculpture. Nothing in the legislation particularly advocated modem art and, in fact, its most vociferous Artists Equity sponsors were old-school practitioners of academic art. As implemented, the ordinance produced a variety of sculptures PUBLIC ART REVIEW FALUWINTER 1993 5

Rockwell Kent, Mail Service in the Tropics, Post Office Departmernt Building, Washington, DC, 1937. Commissioned under one of the Federal Art Projects of the Works Progress Administration. (photo: Fine Arts Program, Public Buildings Service, General Services Administration)

in pubic places, many of them figurative, some abstract. Most were small -scale pieces by local artists that, however pleasant, could hardly have wielded any national influence. It was, in short, an urban enhancement measure, offering incidental benefits to the local art community .

Baltimore followed Philadelphia with a municipal percent-for-art policy in 1964. Like Philadelphia's, Baltimore's ordinance originated with lobbyists from Artists Equity , but its rationale extended far beyond theartcommunity . City Counci lman William Donald Schaefer (later Mayor of Baltimore and Governor of Maryland) sponsored the bill as a vital urban necessity-a measure, as he would later characterize it, to di stinguish the city 's aesthetic character: The question of fin ancing art in new construction is not a matter of can we afford the expense of art in our new buildings, but rather can we afford not to finance art. . .It is art in the form of sculpture, p a in~in gs, mosa ics, fo untains and the like, that turns steril new buildings into li ving things that attract people. People, in turn, are what a c ity needs to li ve.5

Next, San Francisco adopted percent-for-art legislation in 1967, and a host of cities soon fo llowed. States al so embraced percent-forart measures, starting with Hawaii in 1967, Washington in 1974, and succeeded by man y others during the late I 970s and 1980s.

The Kennedy ad ministration markedly redirected the federal attitude toward architecture in May 1962 with its publication of recommendations by the President' s Ad Hoc Committee on Government Office Space. Chaired by Secretary of Labor Arthur Goldberg, the committee was convened in autumn 1961 to explore solutions to the scarcity of administrative buildings in Washington and to what many perceived as the mediocre design of federal office buildings. Its final report confronted the absence of prior policy in a spec ial section, "G uiding Principles for Federal Architecture," which spelled out a new, quality-co nsc ious federal attitude toward architecture, one that wou ld lead directly to a mandate for fine art in public buildings.

Prefaced with idea ls of "d ignity, enterprise, vigor, and stability," the "G uiding Principles" proposed rev italizing governmental architecture through a three-point arc hitectural policy: I ) disti ngui shed building design should be acq uired from the finest American architect ; 2) no officia l governmental style should be allowed to develop; and 3) attenti on should be paid to each bui lding site for its location and beauty. In effect, the " Principles" proposed to abo li sh the "o ld-boy" y tem of federal commiss ions that had presumed a Beaux Arts style and had relegated culpture and mural pai nting to the second-cl ass tatus of ornaments. The report also contai ned an economic rationale: "The belief that good design is optional. . .does not bear scrutiny, and 6 PUBLI C ART REVIEW FALUWINTER 1993

in fact invites the least efficient use of public money." Originally, the Committee had drafted a fourth guiding principle, which would have required the government to spend up to 1 percent of a building 's cost on art. 6 This fourth principle did not appear in the final report only because before publication , General Services Administrator Bernard Boutin (an Ad Hoc Committee member) had already instituted the policy.

In the background of the "Guiding Principles" lay a heightened awareness in the early 1960s among architectural critics, journalists, and policy makers that urban America had become exceedingly ugly and that federal architecture had set a leading example of conformity and the mundane. Architectural Forum hailed the Committee for at last confronting "the Beaux Arts clique that has banished good architecture from the capital city for many decades, and made Washington a cemetery of neo-classic plaster casts, stacking ennui alongside tedium. "7 Jane Jacob's book The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961 ) had already turned a spotlight on the unsightliness of urban America, supplemented by Peter Blake's God's Own lunkyard (1964), an expose on the vulgarity, litter, and decay produced by commercial marketeers and industrial polluters and tolerated by complacent civic officials and apathetic citizens.

The GSA activated its new policy in spring 1963, by continuing, if in greater numbers, the commissioning procedures already in place.

Suggestions for art still depended on each project architect; the percent-for-art policy simply protected art line-items from budgetary cut-backs. The architect normally provided a short list of potential artists, which the GSA would pass along to the Comission of Fine Arts for nonbinding selection (normally based on artistic competence, not necessarily on creative ability). The Commission of Fine Arts might even approve the entire li st, leaving the choice to the GSA. In any event, the selection process was not very rigorous.

With the GSA 's role in selecting artists effectively subordinated to that of the architect, the art it commissioned naturally varied in kind and quality. Academic sculptors continued to enjoy governmental support (such as Paul Jennewein, Joseph Kiselewski, and Marshall Fredericks); but moderni sts, too, received commissions (such as Robert Motherwell , Dimitri Hadzi , and Herbert Ferber). In its first four years, the program sponsored nearly 40 commissions, eclipsing the paltry 12 executed during the four previous years.

But by 1966 it was all over-the program was suspended because of the budgetary pressures of the war in Southeast Asia, some scattered controversy, and probably most damaging of all, apathy. No GSA commission during the period di stingui shed itself as artistically extraordinary: architects treated art as minor parts of their designs, and the public ignored the artwork. Even Congress expressed uneasi-

ness about the GSA program whenever legi slators presented bills during the 1960s to mandate percent-for-art appropriations and to invigorate the selection process. 8 By the late 1960s, the persistent mediocrity offederal art: revealed itself in the growing perception that the architectural and aesthetic concepts of the once-hopeful "Guiding Principle" had been altogether neglected. Speaking on the floor of the U.S. Senate, Edmund Muskie (D-Maine) proposed hi s Federal Fine Arts and Architecture Act of 1969 with a speech di stressingly evocative of those same themes of American ugliness that had supposedly been addressed during the Kennedy administration: Too often Federal buildings outside the District of Columbia are unimaginative, mediocre structures which have been built to last, but not to add aesthetic beauty to their surroundings. Too often they bear little relation to their sites or to architectural sty les around them. Frequentl y the works of art in these buildings have been added as afterthoughts and not as integral parts of the total design.

Unfortunately, many Federal buildings throughout the United States stand as monuments to bad taste for generations to come, when they should be examples of what is best in contemporary American art and architecture. 9

So by 1970, the initiative to enhance federal architecture with art had once again reached a standstill.

Modem public sculpture became a requisite component offederal building design in winter 1973, when the GSA reinstituted its art in architecture program and made its first monumental modern commission: Alexander Calder's Flamingo for the Federal Center in Chicago. By this time, major corporations such as Chase Manhattan and Pepsico had already committed themselves to acquiring modem art; significant municipal commissions such as Henry Moore's Archer in Toronto (1966) and the Picasso in Chicago (1967) had earned civic acclaim ; and the National Endowment for the Art's (NEA) Art in Public Places program had dedicated Alexander Calder's La Grande Vitesse in Grand Rapids in 1969. The impetus for the 1973 program came from the Nixon White House, articulated in a presidential directive on federal aesthetics issued on 16 May 1972. The directive proposed an annual design assembly for government administrators, a program to improve official graphics and design, and a comprehensive review and expansion of the 1962 "Guiding Principles for Federal Architecture" to encompass "a program for including art works in new Federal buildings."lo That summer, GSA officials agreed to reinstate the percent-for-art policy; by September, with the help of representatives of the NEA, they had framed a new procedure to select artists. Project architects would thereafter recommend the location and characteristics of art proposed for their building design.

An NEA panel , including the architect, would then nominate a list of artists, from which the GSA Administrator would make: the final selection-a process that included GSA officials and architects but essentially entrusted selection to independent panels of experts, administered by the NEA. The GSA resurrected its art in architecture policy with a newfound determination to use it. The Public Building Service memorandum that accompanied the new guidelines assertively declared that "fine arts shall be treated as any other essential part of the building ... [and] shall not be deleted as a part of a cost-reducing expediency effort wi thout. .. wri tten approval. " II New standards of aesthetic excellence arbitrated by experts, would constitute, in GSA Administrator Arthur Sampson 's words, "a fresh commitment to commission the finest American artists."1 2The most striking aspect of the new program was the rapidity with which it began. By January 1974, the GSA had received 32 proposals from contract architects, with 12 more in preparation. Founded upon the trial-and-error experience of the NEA, the GSA 's percent-for-art program began quickly with longterm commitment.

The subsequent prosperity of the GSA's percent-for-art program and the many similar programs administered by states and municipalities is by now well known. What is often forgotten, however, are the broad inclusive reasons for which such programs were formednot just as entitlements for artists but as necessary accoutrements to

governmental arc hitecture, means of urban enhancement, and expansive commitments to civic welfare. But since the notion of allocating a small percentage of architectural budgets fo r art is nothing new, the salient question about percent-for-art has never been one of whether to allocate funds, but simply, of how.

John Wetenhall is Curator of Painting and Sculpture at the Birmingham Museum of Art and author of The Ascendency of Modern Public Sculpture in America (Berkeley: University of California Press, forthcoming) and with Karal Ann Marling, coauthor of lwo lima: Monuments, Memories and the American Hero, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991).

Notes: I. These figures are extrapolated fro m George Gurney, Sculpture alld the Federal Triangle, (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1985).

2. On the Treasury Section, see Francis v. O'Connor, Federal Art Patronage, (College Park: University of Maryland, 1966).

3. See Art and Government: Report to the Presidelll by the Commission of Fine Arts, (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1953), p. 45.

4. See Joyce Newman, "One Percent for Art Kit No.2," published by Arti sts Equ ity Association, Inc., n.d. (NEA Library, Art in Public Places notebook).

5. Quoted in the document "% for Art," p. 29 (NEA Library, Art in Public Places notebook #2).

6. Letter from Daniel P. Moynihan to Arthur Goldberg, John F. Kennedy Library, Papers of August Heckscher, box 30, "Executive Banch-Federal Building: Design & Decoration, 3/30/62-6/15/62."

7. " At Last: Leadership from Washington," Architectural Forum (A ugust 1962), p.79.

8. A file marked "Fine Art Legislation" in the files ofthe GSA Art in Architecture program contains copies of seven di fferent percent-for-art bills proposed in Congress from 196 1 through 1972.

9. Congressional Record-Senate, 10 March 1969, v. 115, pI. 5, pp. 5688-89.

10. "Statement about Increased Attention to the Arts and Design in Enhancing Federal Buildings and Publications," Public Papers of Richard M. Nixon (Washington, D.C.: Office of the Federal Register, 18 May 1972).

II. Larry Roush to AU Regional Commissioners, PBS, 24 April 73, GSA Files, " Art in Architecture: '73-Present."

12. Arthur Sampson, in "Fine Arts in Federal Building," Calder/Chicago (dedication program published by the GSA, 1974); on the GSA program, see " Donald W. Thalacker, The Place of Art in the World of Architecture (New York: Chelsea House, 1980).

Arlene Love, Face Fragment, Monell Chemical Senses Center, Philadelphia, PA, 1975. Commissioned through the Redevelopment Authority of Philadelphia Percent for Fine Art Program. (photo: Howard Brunner, Fairmount Park Art Association, courtesy The Redevelopment Authority of Philadelphia Percent for Fine Art Program)

Variations on a theme

by Claire Wickersham n the late 1950s, modem American architecture, which arose from the legacy of Mies van de Rohe, was rapidly creating an urban environment devoid of ornament and information.

To a small handful of artists, designers, officials, and civic leaders in Philadelphia, creating a mechanism for incorporating works of fine art into the built environment seemed an appropriate way to reintroduce these humanizing elements. Several European cities had successfully created programs to incorporate works of fine art into buildings in the post-WWII era. Why couldn't the same be done here in the United States? Whether any of these proponents of the landmark percent-for-art legislation in Philadelphia knew that they were beginning an American cultural phenomenon in 1959 is doubtful.

In March 1959, the Philadelphia Redevelopment Authority passed a resolution requiring private developers to expend 1 percent of the construction cost of their projects on fine art. Later that year, the Philadelphia City Council adopted a similar ordinance pwviding for I percent of the construction cost of public buildings, bridges, arches, gates, and other structures to be devoted to fine arts. I Over the past three and a half decades, the field of public art has undergone many remarkable changes in the nature of the works of art created, the relationship of those works to their sites, and the communities in which they are located. Similarly, the manner in which percent-forart programs are developed and administered has changed dramatically.

The percent-for-art phenomenon has reached all levels of government in every region of the United States. As of 1993, over 150 agencies, including the federal government, many states, counties, cities, redevelopment agencies, and transportation authorities have adopted similar measures to reintroduce aesthetic considerations into the built environment. At the federal level, both the General Services Administration and the Veterans Administration established percentfor-art programs in the 1970s. More than half of the states have adopted percent-for-art legislation, including states as different as Colorado, Iowa, Maine, and New Jersey . County governments, such as Montgomery County, MD, and King County, WA, have created uccessful percent-for-art programs as well; Fulton County, GA is the most recent to join this company. Cities as large as New York,

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8 PUBLIC ART REVIEW FALUWINTER 1993

Chicago, and Miami and as small as Beaverton, OR, Loveland, CO, and Missoula, MT, have dedicated a percentage of public construction funds to public art. Medium-sized communities have also jumped on the public art bandwagon, including Sacramento, Austin, and Tulsa.

The percent-for-art concept has also taken root in other public and quasipublic agencies across the country. As in Philadelphia, redevelopment agencies in Los Angeles and Oakland have stipulated thatdeve10pers mustsetaside a percentage of their construction budgets for fine arts. Similarly, transportation authorities in Seattle, Boston, Dallas, and St. Louis have sought to enhance their integral, but often mundane, part of urban life by adopting the percent-for-art strategy. Air travelers in communities across the country like Denver, New Orleans, and Phoenix are, or soon will be, captivated by the works of public art being incorporated into these facilities .

According to a recent survey, public art programs in the United States have generated over $160 million dollars and commissioned or purchased over 6,000 works of art since 1985 alone. In the last three years, public art programs have initiated more than 650 projects annually. Remarkably, these statistics represent only a fraction of the total impact of the public art field .2 Typically the term "percent-for-art" refers to a public mandate that a certain percentage of a building 's construction cost be set aside to incorporate public art. In almost all cases, this mandate applies to the construction of both new and renovated buildings. Often the percentfor-art requirement extends to other capital construction projects, such as parks and bridges. Several communities, like Seattle, Dallas, and Phoenix, realizing that a vast majority of public construction funds are spent on infrastructure, have applied their percent-for-art ordinances to the construction of streets, sewers, and power lines.

Percent-for-art allocations vary from as little as 112 to as much as 2 percent.

Pioneers in the percent-for-art field, like Philadelphia, generally took the so-called "aesthetic band-aid" approach to public art, seeking to compensate for the austerity of modem architecture by reintroducing ornamentation. These early percent-for-art programs generally resulted in commissioning abstract and minimalist works of art that were designed as afterthoughts to the buildings they adorned.

Often these works of art were as fo re ign to popul ar tas te as the modern arc hi tectu ral structures they were intended to e mbelli sh. Freque ntl y located o n pl azas outside buildings, these works of art had a very limi ted relationship to their site. The ir " publi c" nature arose not fro m conte nt or process but fro m locati on and scale. Many works of publ ic art funded unde r the auspi ces of pe rcent-fo r-art programs in these early years were simpl y overgro wn works of studi o art. Despite the ir limited re latio nship to the ir sites, some of these works have, with the passage of time, become e mbraced by the communiti es in which they are located as much-loved symbo ls and landmarks , fo r example Claes Olde nberg' s Clothespin in Phil ade lphia, which was commi ssioned through the Redevelopme nt Authority.

O ver time, percent-fo r-art programs have tried to address a myri ad of issues in conte mporary society beyond the mere ornamentati on of the built environment. Recent programs have pursued enhancing and preserving a community' s arti stic heritage ; enriching the public environment; ex panding the opportuniti es fo r c itizens to experi ence publi c art; promoting greater public interactio n with publi c spaces; empl oy ing public art to address the socia l problems confronting Ameri can communities; and creating opportuni ties fo r artists to collaborate with other design profess ionals in developing the built enviro nment. Contemporary arti sts workin g in the public realm have become increasingly interested in using the physical characteri stics of a site as the source of the ir creative inspiration.

Today , our concepti on of public art has become more sophi sticated than it was three decades ago. More and more arti sts are acti vely engaging in di alogs with communities as a part of their creati ve process , coll aborating with other des ign professionals, a nd pushing the boundari es of public art. The definition of public art fo r many now includes cqnsiderations of fun ction, hi story, e nvironment, and content. Throug h percent-for-art programs, arti sts are venturing into the des ign of transit systems, waste treatment plants, electrical substati ons, par ks, pl aygro unds, schools, office buildings, bridges, libraries, fire stati ons, community centers, streetscapes- almos t all e lements of the built environment.

Just as arti sts have grown increasingly sophi sticated in their

approaches to public art, so have percent-for-art programs grow n increas ingly sophi sticated in the ir understanding of public art programs' unique roles and the appro pri ate means of admini stering such programs. Earl y percent-for-art legislation was frequentl y adopted as a sort of panacea for what was lac king in modern architecture, without an inkling of the powerful and significant ro les public art can play in the built environment. It is onl y with the passage of time that thi s unique role, as well as the structural process fo r enabling it, has evolved.

In the case of the City of Phil adelphi a, the ori gina l percent-for-art ord inance was a mere one sentence in length. It stipul ated that the Ci ty' s Fine Arts Commi ss ion should certi fy that "said ornamentatio n is fi tti ng and appropri ate to the function and location of the structure."3There was little articulatio n of the goals of thi s new ordinance and how those goals would be achi eved. At that time, no single public agency was g iven responsibility fo r admini sterin g thi s new program.

Architects on public projects were given the sole res ponsibility fo r selecting artists and wo rks of art. As a result, as ide fro m requiring fin al approva l by the Arts Commi ss io n, there was no publi c process associated with the program and a mere handful of artists received numerous commi ssions. However, as the fi e ld evo lved and more percent- fo r-art progra ms were created, a more sophi sticated and democratic approach to public art ad mini stratio n developed .

In 1959 it was perfectl y log ical to ass ign responsibili ty fo r selecting a work of art to the project architect. After a ll , it was hi s o r her building that the arti st was be ing commi ss io ned to adorn . Incorporating the work of art was seen as the onl y goal; why it was there, how it go t there, and its relatio nship to its site and the surrounding community were of littl e importance.

Over time, percent-for-art programs have pl aced increasing signi ficance on the means by which a work of publi c art is created. We have come to realize that public art is not merely a process of placing works of great aesthetic value into the publi c domain , bu t the result of a di alog between arti st, des ig ner, c lient, and pU blic. T hro ugh trial

PUBLIC ART REV IEW FA LUWINTER 1993 9

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Michele Oka Doner,tilie undetermined, Entrance Lobby of Criminal JlIstice Center, Philadelphia. Projected installation: 1995. Commissioned by the Percent for Art Program, City of Philadelphia. (photo: D. James Dee, courtesy Percent For Art Program, City of Philadelphia)

and error, we have developed a greater understanding of the highly complex and crucial relationships among the project' s players. We have explored new methods of working collaboratively and have come to rea]jze the value of including an arti st in the earliest stages of a project as an equal player. The outcome of thi s approach is refl ected in Lobby of the Floating Ceilings, a collaboration between artist Crai g Cree Stone and architect Randy Morris to design the lobby of the Krinski Building in Long Beach, CA, commissioned by the Public Corporation for the Arts. We have come to view artists not solely as makers of art objects but as designers, philosophers, planners, mediators, facilitators, and citizens. Public art adminjstrators have come to understand their own multiple roles as cultural planners, advocates, mediators, negoti ators, and public-policy makers. All these players have come to view the public not as a faceless mass of people but as unjque communities that must be identified and defi ned for each project. Once this is accomplished, we can understand the importance of involving the public in a project and of implementing thoughtful public education efforts. In my own experience with the East Austin Senjor Acti vity Center, the Communi ty Ad visory Board not only embraced the project, but ultimately requested that the City Council approve an additional $ 10,000 for public art by educating and in volving the future users of this fac ili ty in all phases of Austin's first percent-for-art project.

Depending on the nature of the sponsoring agency, percent-for-art programs have been developed through a variety of means. Some, such as the program in Austin, have arisen though the efforts of a small group of well-connected indi viduals who saw the passage of a percent-for-art initiative as the hallmark of a sophi sticated community. Other programs, ]jke New Orleans', have come about through years of lobbying by artists and arts organizations. Still others were created by virtue of the vision and deterrrunation of elected or appointed officials. Until fairly recentl y, however, few percent-forart programs were developed with the benefit of a comprehensive, communi ty-based cultural planning process.

In 1986 the City of Dallas Di vision of Cultural Affa irs i nitiated an 18-month public art master planning process. This citizen-based effort sought to create a public art program that was responsive to the city's unique characteristics and needs. Through thi s planning process, a percent-for-art program was created to " integrate the work and thinking of artists-along with other design profess ionals-into the planning, de ign, buildi ng, and development of Dallas in order to effect the highest standards of design for the City."4 In 1988, as a re ul t of this planning process, the City of Dallas adopted a percentfo r-art ordinance that allocates 1.5 percent fo r most capi tal construc-

ti on projects and .75 percent for street, sidewalk, and drainage improvements to public art.

In 1987, soon after the passage of a 1 percent for art ordinance, the Phoeni x Arts Commission also undertook a public art pl anning process. Phoenix's recentl y adopted ordinance app]jed to all capital construction projects and was anticipated to generate several million doJIars for public art. (Indeed, just two years later Phoeni x voters passed a $ 1 billion public works bond issue.) Through thi s plann ing process, Phoenix identified several networks of public art sites based upon an understanding of the city as a "complex urban landscape made from a layering of differing and complementary systems."s These urban elements, which have since become the sites of numerous public art projects, include Phoeni x's water, open space, landmarks, and vehicul ar/pedestrian systems. The result of thi s planning process is a framework for analyzing public art opportunities rooted in an understanding of Phoeni x ' s unique phys ical, cultural, hi storical, and environmental characteri stics. As a resul t, rather than existing simply as ornaments for buildings, public art in Phoenix is inextricably linked to its urban fabric.

Since 1959, much has also been learned about the importance of administering a percent-for-artprogram. Based upon a broader understanding of the potential role of public art, many programs have reali zed the importance of being able to develop projects where appropriate, which may not necessaril y beonl y where a building is being erected.

Therefore, when permj ssible by law, many programs have created mechanisms for pooling funds that can be used for sites other than those that generated the funds. Perhaps most important, public art admini strators have realized the tremendous importance of using an open public process for selecting artists and works of art. Percent-for-art programs have always excited a measure of controversy; they should, fo r controversy is a vital part of the democratic process. However, we have come to realize that an open and defendable selection process, coupled wi th a conscientious public education effort, can go a long way toward mitigating controversy and generall y ensures more successful projects.

As a field, percent-for-art progra ms have learned from one another's trials, tribulations, and successes. At the same time, we have come to understand that what works in one community may not be appropri ate fo r another. Many early leaders in the fi eld of public art have undertaken self-evaluations that have led to a restructuring of ordinances and entrenched methods of adrruni stration. For example, in 1990 the City of Phil adelphia Percent for Art Program developed a new set of guidelines and procedures based upon a more public and systematic process. These open national competitions have resulted

Plercent -for-art

programs have always excited a measure of controversy; they

should, for controversy is a vital part of the

dernlocratic process.

10 PUB LIC ART REVIEW FALUWINTER 1993

in projects such as John Biers' design for a window in the new Philadelphia Criminal Justice Center, which is expected to be complete in 1995 .

What does the future hold for the percent-for-art field? The development of new programs seems likely, especially among transportation authorities and medium-sized communities. It is hoped that newcomers to the field will realize the importance of undertaking a cultural planning process when they embark on a public art effort.

They must consider the nature of public art, the constantly changing context in which it occurs, the capacity of the field to stretch current boundaries, and a myri ad of issues and approach these through as many disciplines as appropriate. Only through continued experimentation and redefinition will we be able to create public: art that is relevant and resonant. The result will be a generation of percent-forart programs that realize the full potential of artists working in the public realm.

Claire Wickersham was Coordinator of the City of AUistin Art in Public Places Program, the first municipal public art program in Texas, from 1986 to 1989. She lives in New Orleans and consults locally and nationally on public art and design, in addition to being the Co-Director of the Public Art Institute at the National Assembly of Local Arts Agencies.

Notes: I. Pen ny Balkin Bach, Public Art in Philadelphia, (pittsburgh: Temple University Press, 1993), pp. 13 1-32.

2. Results of a 1992 survey of public art programs in the U.S. conducted by the Public Art Institute at the Nationa l Assembly of Local Arts Agencies, the City of Philadelphia, and the Arts Extension Service, University of Mas.sachusetts at Amherst. Of the 104 respondents, 75 were percent-for-art-based programs. At recent count, there are 195 active public art programs in the U.S ., 136 of which are

based on percent-for-art legislation. Full analysis of survey findin gs wi ll be published in winter 1993.

3. Section 16-103 of the Philadelphia Code, Bill 3402 adopted D~cember, 1959 .

4. "Visual Dallas: A Public Art Plan for the City," (Report), Mickey Gustin , Project Director, 1987, p. iii .

5. "Public Art Plan for Phoenix: Ideas and Vi sions," (Report), William Morri sh, Catherine R. Brown, and Grover E. Mouton , 1988, p. 4.

PUBLIC ART REVIEW FALUWINTER 1993 11

Robert Millar, Native Plant Demonstration Garden, Alvarado Water Filtration Plant, San Diego, CA. (illustration: James Murray, courtesy the artist)

mPublic Art for the Nineties Re-sharpetling the Cutting Edge b

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ince the initi ation ofthe precedent-setting policy by tlhePhiladelphia Redevelopment Authority in 1959, which later became a city-wide ordinance, percent-for-public art programs have proliferated throughout the country. Among other early national initiatives were the General Services Administration's "Art-in-Architecture" program, establi shed in 1963, and the Na~ion a l Endowment for the Art ' 1967 "Art in Public Places" program. [See also Wetenhall,

S p.4]

Over the ensuing years, public art policies have been redefined, relegislated, and reregulated as new, more successful methods and mechani sms for funding have been implemented. Certainly the process of public art has undergone dramatic changes since the days when a "successful " piece of public art was an installation in a publicly accessible spot, ergo: "plunk art."

Next came the "site-specific" project, in which artist, architect, and other design professionals collaborated. Today 's cutting-edge programs have raised the collaborative venture to heights unimagined some 30 years ago. From initial concept design through final accomplishment, the artist, architect, landscape architect, engineer, and other required support members work as a team to create the project.

What mu t a public art program do to succeed in the lean and mean American economy of the '90s? Public art experts offer many diverse and contradictory answers. "Art success" often seems to mandate that the "process" is as important, if not more so, than the "product," a point of view which has been much debated since the 1970s. Does a "cutting edge" public art program ensure cutting-edge public art?

From Philadelphia to Portland, from Miami to San Diego and Los Angeles, the public art world is revving up for the twenty-firs t century to seek answers to that question. Around the country, new attitudes toward funding art and toward community involvement are becoming increasingly apparent. The fo llowing cities appear to be on the forefront of today 's innovative public art programming.

12 PUBLIC ART REVIEW FALUWINTER 1993

Miami,FL The Metro-Dade " Art in Public Places" program, mandated in 1973, requires an expenditure of 1.5 percent of construction costs for all new county buildings. Funds from the various construction projects are pooled in the Art Trust Fund and allocated as needed for artwork in selected public sites, for educational programs, and for maintaining existing works. As with many long-standing programs, Metro-Dade has moved progressively from commissioning afterthe-fact objects, to site-specific singular works , to collaborative works conceived at the earliest possible stage of project design, to incorporating the artist's unique vision.

Due in great part to the successful track record of Metro-Dade, Miami county commissioners recently amended existing policy to include aesthetic considerations in all new city, county, and federa lly funded transportation projects. Metro-Dade'scurrent public art showcase project is the Miami International Airport. The original concept of artist Robert Irwin 's Master Plan-integrating artwork into the very fabric of the airport design-has been retained.

Park One Park, with a budget of $4.3 million, is the centerpiece of an expansion of traffic improvements around the airport's main terminal. The site, which is the size oftwo football fields , is currently occupied by two-level short-term parking. Plans call for creating a world-class park/plaza featuring extensive water features and tropical landscaping. A forma l esplanade of palms wi ll define the primary circulatory routes and encourage pedestrians to relax in its many shaded seating areas. Through an open competitive process, lody Pinto has been selected to work with the firm of Wallace, Roberts, and Todd, landscape architects, to design this major urban artsite. Keith Sonnier will collaborate on the design of the overhead "skywalk," a landscaped pedestrian promenade with overviews of the park, which will lead passengers to their destinations in the departure terminal.

Some 10 regional and national artist/design team s will work to enhance the character of major concourses and to create a sound and light environment connecting terminal and concourse.

Tropically

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artists to remember that "the art be the common language of all those using the system, connecting riders with their environment, their history , and with the technology that moves them. " Artists, among them Portlanders Tad Savinar and Bill Will , are designing images to be etched in glass canopies, windscreens, elevator doors, and panels along the line. Several designs of street furniture and paving patterns will be used throughout the rail system, and light will be used as a medium in myriad ways.

Twenty stations are targeted for artwork, but concern has already been expressed about whether the $1 million already allocated will stretch beyond the center city core.

Through its engineering contract, BES, a city department, has hired an artist team to participate on the Columbia Treatment Plant Headworks Project. Twenty thousand dollars have been set aside for design/consulting fees, but no percent-for-art funds have yet been al located for the project. Even though the artists have begun working collaboratively with the architect and landscape architect to bring their unique perspective to the project, it is unclear whether any artwork will actually be created.

It is encouraging to note thatBES did recommend the inclusion of 1.33 percent for public art in the $10 million estimated construction budget. Funds have been set aside forthe integration of art into BES 's latest facility, the Water Pollution Control Laboratory. An artist will be selected shortly to participate in the overall project design.

San Diego, CA At last count, California had over 50 active public art programs.

Unique among them is the city of San Diego's Public Art Policy, heralded as one of the most responsive to community needs of those legislated in the 1990s, despite the fact that the city has no across-the-board mandated percent-for-art requirement for public construction.

The 1992 policy challenged 30 years of public art policies nationally. Spearheaded by the San Diego Commission for Arts and Culture, this initiative permits each city department, in consultation with the commission's staff, to select capital im-

colored-coded paving of promenade and park will delineate the different functional areas.

Vivian Rodriguez, administrator of the Metro-Dade art program, states : "What will be in place will not be object-oriented .. .We are seeking to fully integrate the public art into the public spaces."

Portland, OR Following the lead of the Oregon state legislature, the city of Portland enacted a 1 percent public art ordinance that was later increased to 1.33 percent. The Metropolitan Arts Commission (MAC), charged with commissioning and managing all city and county public art, is guided by a standing adv isory committee, which uses panel s to select artists. Each year the committee holds a retreat to evaluate the past year's performance and to establish new goals.

Eloise MacMurray , Public Art Program Director for MAC, states that her organization is striving to improve and expand its definition of public art in line with the community cultural plan, and is seeking a greater representation of artists and cultural groups to serve on its selection panels.

MAC has actively lobbied to enlist other departments and agencies within the city and county to voluntarily set aside funds for public art in new facilities. Among current MAC projects are Tri-Met and the Bureau of Environmental Services (BES) .

Tri-Met, the Westside Light Rail Transit System, represents many firsts for Oregon. None of the Tri-Met art will have a "conspicuous look," according to project architect Greg Baldwin, " instead, the artists will have a conspicuous role." MAC asks its

provement projects for artists' involvement on a case-by-case basis.

Artists are selected by either the project' s design consu ltant or by a competition. The prime objective is to involve artists in the conceptual stage of project design so their work is not mere "icing on the cake" but integral to the project. Gail Goldman , Public Art Coordinator for the commission, states: "There is no established percentage set aside for public art. .. it is too limiting! " Instead, the art budget is negotiated on a project-by-project basis out of the capital

PUBLIC ART REVIEW FALUWINTER 1993 13

Chris Janney, Winds of Sound/Gates of Light, glass, light, sound, Miami International Airport/Connector, proposal accepted 1992. (sketch: Metro Dade Art in Public Places)

improvements budget. Art "objects" have been replaced by art integral to the creation of more interesting public spaces and have been designed through collaboration between artists and other design profess ionals.

One of the most impress ive new projects in San Diego is the Alvarado Filtration Plant, an $80 million expansion and renovation currently in the construction drawing stage. Artist Robert Millar has been hired as a subcontractor to Malcolm Pirnie, Inc. , Engineers, and thi s artist-engineer partnership has resulted in a substantial improvement to the traditional engineering design needed to meet the city's present and future treatment needs.

Millar conducted door-to-door interviews in the neighborhoods surrounding the pl ant so that the design team could relate to the concerns of residents. In the process, public education facilities, including a self-guided plant tour, have been integrated into the plant des ign.

A demonstration garden of native plants is the last stop on this public tour. Thi s educational garden is located on the mof of a 21 million gallon reservoir that holds the water supply for metropolitan San Diego. Before arriving at the reservoir, the visitor pas:ses through a grove of sycamores, a tree associated with water in the region. A small pavilion serves as a viewing well that allows visitors to see and hear below the surface of the 170 million gaIJOns of water coursing into the reservoir each day.

The project also includes an environmentally sensitive naturestudy garden. This thoughtful plan reaches out to the community, teaching about the responsible use of water and fulfilling one of the city's basic needs with a fine, cost-effective facility.

The fi ltration plant project's consulting engineer has stated that he cannot imagine a future project, whether public or private" without an arti st on board. That's because the city has saved so much money, the community has been satisfied, and the work has run so smoothly.

Los Angeles, CA Mickey Gustin, art planner of the Los Angeles Community Redevelopment Agency (CRA), states that its public art program is intimately in vo lved with urban revitalization. The agency formalized its I percent public art poli cy in 1985 , focu sing on the downtown Central Business District, Bunker Hill , and Little Tokyo redevelopment areas. The po licy was expanded seven years later to encompass all urban renewal projects. In order to integrate art into the overall project design, developers are required to establi sh an art budget and an art plan , and to select the artist at the outset of project planning.

Developments with budgets of less than $250,000 and low-income hou ing are exempted fro m the requirement.

Los Angeles developers, unli ke those in most other cities, must contribute a portion of their art commitment monies to the cultural fund linked to the area where those funds are generated, e.g., the Chinatow n Cultural Fund or the Holl ywood Cu ltural Fund. The indi vidual community determines how the money can best be spent to further its miss ion of revitali zation through the involvement of arti sts.

14 PUBLIC ART REV IEW FALUWINTER 1993

Los Angeles, like many large cities, is most concerned with the creation of vibrant streetscapes-places where people want to be.

Public art enhances that goal. CRA, Like other programs across the nation, seeks to actively involve the community in decisions about public art and its sites. Thus regional and culturally diverse artists are included in planning and participating in the program 's public spaces.

Often artists are paid an hourly fee, with the art component bid out with the overall construction documents rather than as a separate line item.

Zanja Madre (Spanish for Mother Ditch), Andrew Leicester's $2 million environment at the 801 Tower in downtown Los Angeles, draws upon the popular name given by early settlers to the Los Angeles River. An excellent example of integrated public art and urban design, Zanja Madre is also a complex and intriguing case study because the artist was brought in after the fact.

The fust preliminary design submitted to the CRA Design Advisory Committee was rejected; the developer had failed to comply with the street-level design guidelines established by the agency for the site.

Andrew Leicester was selected to work col1aboratively with the project architect, John Hayes, in designing the required "Street Wall" and a compatible articulation of the building facade up to the level of the fourth floor. The resulting redesign permitted the project to move forward.

Leicester was responsible for the design of all hard and soft exterior public spaces and surrounding amenities, in which he unfolds his mythology of the city 's need-and greed-for water, creating a sitewide world of richly detailed images.

As these profiles attest, American cities must foster development, protect the environment, recreate their infrastructure, and interact with their communities to compete culturally in the next century. Our cities are discovering that their public spaces should symbolize their commitment to their future. Indeed they have already learned that they still have a lot to learn, and they are learning fast.

Mary A. Kilroy is a public art consultant and was director of the Philadelphia Redevelopment Authority's pioneering percentfor-art program for 23 years.

Robert Millar, Old Filter Control Room, Alvarado Water Filtration Plant Renovation, San Diego, CA. (illustration: James Murray, courtesy the artist)

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n 1989, with 10 years of operations behind it, the State of Maine's Percent-for-Art Program faced a formidable challenge--survi val.

What had initially been perceived as a threat became instead a validation of the program's achievements. When state legislators passed the Percent-for-Art Act that initiated a public art program for Maine in 1979, they included a "sunset" provision that required the program to be evaluated and reauthorized 10 years later. The act mandated that 1 percent of construction budgets for all state buildings (with the exception of correctional facilities) be set aside for art projects. It encouraged, but did not require, the participation of public schools. Its regulations, which encouraged cooperation andreasonable local control, proved to be one of the program's biggest keys to success. The measure of this success was assured when the program was not only reauthorized but the $25,000 per-project cap on public school projects was increased to the current $40,000.

The inclusion of public art projects in public elementary and secondary schools financed by local school districts through bond funds was a unique and bold proposition. Local school districts, which have often exercised tight control over the most insignificant decisions, seem like unlikely patrons for public art. Acknowledging this, the legislature made district participation optional and established procedures that encouraged shared decision-making. What the legislature hadn't anticipated was the competitive spirit that rose between districts, each vying for the best possible school facility.

Typically, districts planning to build a new school send board members on a tour of recently completed projects. After seeing

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schools with successful art projects, many district boards wanted art projects of their own. Once this began, the demand for public art projects grew and grew.

Art projects for schools have been popular in Maine. With 309 projects completed to date, 60 percent of projects have been for public schools, 20 percent for state college or uni versi ties, and the remaini ng 20 percent for state office buildings such as courthouses or highway rest areas. With a small staff financed by state appropriations, the public art program always lags behind the demand. When current administrator Peter Simmons began working for the program, he faced a backlog of 140 projects. Six years later, with the addition of one staff member, he has been able to whittle that backlog down to 35.

In doing so, Simmons has given priority to those projects with the largest potential audience, and schools, with their ever-changing populations, are at the top of the list.

The success of public art in public schools cannot simply be explained by rivalry between school boards. The artist selection process and school staff attitudes ensure that key decision-makers are engaged and that a consensus is reached. To guide the artist selection process, an advisory committee is established for each project. Its membership begins with the project architect, a representative of the local commissioning agency, and a representative of the state art commission who is an artist or arts organization representative. For most projects, an additional community representative and a second arts advocate are added to the committee. The state art commission delegates final decision-making to this local advisory committee.

School districts may also delegate, but if they don't, they must include a district board representative on the advisory committee. Fifty percent of the time, district boards opt for such delegation. Advisory committee meetings are open to the public, and consensus is a must.

If it's not there, Simmons says, he lets the project take its time until members work things out among themselves. Simmons points out that once a school district has granted approval of a project concept, it really can't back out, so most disagreements eventually get resol ved.

When a budget is less than $7,000, advisory committees are encouraged to purchase existing works or hold a limited competition for selection of a single artist. Program staff is funded by state appropriation rather than by the art project budgets, but advisory committees can use up to 10 percent of project funds for their own costs. Commissions are commonly quite small. The maximum commission to anyone artist to date has been $39,000, but project budgets have been as low as $1,400.

Program guidelines suggest that priority be given to artists from Maine, but Simmons says he will work with any artists willing to face the challenge of a small budget with enthusiasm. Because Maine is an important vacation destination for much of New England, Simmons notes, engaging the region's larger community of artists is important.

Julie Silliman is a public art administrator living in Los Angeles.

PUBLIC ART REVIEW FALUWINTER 1993 15

Unsponsored Independent Public Artists unding drives most public art projects, and percent programs pay for most of the permanent public art that we encounter. However, it's not clear what the impact of such sponsorship may have on the artist. In most cases, an artist is asked to respond to a list of restrictions and limitations, many of which have nothing to do with the artist's personal interests. The psychology of carrot-dangling, combined with the inevitable bureaucratic red tape, has undoubtedly stifled many well-intentioned efforts.

With this in mind, it's no wonder that many artists work outside the system and avoid the dangling carrots. Some artists live in both worlds, creating sponsored and unsponsored art. In this feature, PAR profiles five efforts in different parts of the country: Dan Havel in Houston, TX; Pat Benincasa in Minneapolis, ~v1N; Gerhard Pagenstecher in Portland, OR; Gwylene Gallimard and Jean-Marie Mauclet in Charleston, SC; and Mary Ann Unger in New York, NY. What these free spirits have in common is that they manage to support their personal/public visions, regardless of monetary gain, and avoid the shackles of sponsorship.

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Alchemist in Residence b

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n the dri ve to Dan Havel' s Alchemy House in Houston, TX, one can't help but notice the curious neighborhood in which it exists.

The houses are old, some decrepit and crumbling, others kept up through decades of being li ved in . The largely Hispanic commun ity is becoming gentrified, and, as we know, artists are often the first in clearing the way fo r developers. Artist Havel has something else in mind : revision, mutation, destruction .

Because real estate in thi s part of Houston is inexpensive and the area accessible to downtown and cultural centers, many archi tects and design flrms have buil t offices and homes here, large ones of aluminum or corrugated tin that give the neighborhood an eccentric, if confused, appeal. A graffiti-scraw led shack sits around the corner fro m an architect' s monumentaJ aJ uminum home that Havel refer to as the "ca tie."

Alchemy House could be situated at either extreme. As it turns out, Havel has located his evolving project in a imple five-room, IOOO-sq.-ft. ra nch house typical of Houston' s earl y twentiethcentury archi tectu re. It doesn' t stand out un ti l one enters to find a square of garden dug out from the wood fl oor. Havel' s neighbors, mo t of whom have li ved in his house at 54 19 Blossom St., built in 19 16 and now condemned, at one time or another, regard it with an 16 PUBLIC ART REVIEW FALUWINTER 1993

accepting curiosity. The Packlicks, who own the bicycle shop and art gaJlery next door, were married in its backyard. Havel was its last resident, moving out a year and a half ago to make room for Alchemy House, slated for demolition in May 1994. That is, if it survives the processes Havel has unleashed within.

Havel' s interest in the ancient science of aJchemy is the framework upon which he has constructed his project. The five rooms are di vided thematically according to the basic elements of alchemy. The main room is earth . The living room is saJt and lead .

The bathroom is mercury. The bedroom is copper and sulfur. The ki tchen houses Havel 's reconstructed "cosmic furnace," the kind aJchemists used fo r heating and decomposing the elements.

The walls of the mai n room are thickly caked wi th mud from floor to ceiling. The earth was dug up directl y from the backyard. On the wall above the garden (which at one point was harvest to a crop of corn) is an "adrogyn y fig ure" painted in bri ght yellow and blue encaustic. Copper pennies embedded in the yellow bedroom wall s create swirling, ri ppled shapes. The alchemicaJ symbol for copper is cut into one wall , leaving behind a hollowed, negative space. Sulfur will be piled aJong the floor edges. A section of wall in the bathroom is of corrugated tin; the rest, including the sink, toilet, and bathtub, is painted a shiny silver. The smaJl mirror has an alchemical fo rmula drawn upon its surface. Samples of cinnabar, the

ore from which mercury is extracted, are displayed along a narrow shelf.

Despite this literal approach, there is a metaphorical dimension to Alchemy House. Havel explains: "In the West. .. an alchemist was a scientist who was trying to understand the powers of nature, specifically the powers of transformation. For me, it was the idea of the creative process that anyone has the power to transform. For me, getting a house to transform is giving me the ability to introduce alchemy as an idea to people." Although Havel intends to remain specific in his references to alchemy through his choice of materials, it is easy to forget this and instead simply watch the salt particles on the walls melt into sparkling clumps of crystal. Few visitors to Alchemy House will know anything about this esoteric body of knowledge. Havel intends to provide handouts with a brief explanation of each room, yet the house's multidimensional approach makes possible a range of meanings that will vary from viewer to viewerfrom an artist to a gardener to an architect.

In discussing his work, Havel cites Ann Hamilton, David Ireland, and Mel Chin as artists he feels an affinity with, associations that place his concerns clearly within the fine arts community. "The one thing I don ' t have in common with the alchemists," says Havel, "is that I am not a process artist. I hate printmaking because it takes too many processes to make a print. .. and alchemy is a very systematic science-I am more an abstract expressionist, I gain knowledge from accidents and the uses of different material." He sees himself primarily as an installation artist, and would like to pursue the concept of Alchemy House in different sites around the country.

Three public openings will be held in September, December, and prior to the demolition in May. In between, Alchemy House is open to the public by appointment. The September opening will be accompanied by a performance piece by artist Kelly Scott Kelly that uses each room, as well as a sound installation by composer Bill Kelly .

Alchemy House has developed slowly and will continue doing so until May. In spite of the lengthy duration and financial expenseHavel estimates he's spent between three and four thousand dollars to date, with the highest expenses being rent and Elmer's glue-he is excited and eager about revealing the project to the public. Because it is self-funded, Havel has ,had to be particularly resourceful. Much of the material is scavenged, such as the strange biomorphic sculptures on display in alcoves dug from the walls between the Earth room and Salt and Lead room. The salt came from the remains of Meg Webster's Salt Cone, shown in her retrospecti ve at the Contemporary Arts Museum , Houston, in January. Havel has even rigged a leak in the roof to drain into a lead pan in the Mercury room, travel through the wall, and spill into the large lead cone suspended on the other side.

Alchemy House is not public art in either the traditional or activist sense. It's an aesthetic experience, an experiment taking place in one of many houses in the neighborhood . Perhaps there is little difference between what Havel does in his house and what the neighboors across the street, who run a car garage, do in theirs-a combination of business and pleasure, one activity among others taking place in the community. The finishing touch on Alchemy House will be painting the outside entirely in gold. At least that is Havel's hope. "It will take a lotofmoney and alotof gold paint," he muses, "butI'd love for them to tear down a gold house, a shiny gold house. "

Mark Frohman is a Houston, TX-based free-lance writer.

Editor's note: Following the submission of this article, Dan Havel received a grant allowing him to complete his vision for Alchemy House by painting it gold. Alchemy House was supported by a New Forms Regional Initiative Grant administered by Diverse Works and Mexic-Arte. This program is funded by the NEA , the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Andy Warhol Foundationfor the Visual Arts. A solstice event, featuring a cappella galic ritual songs by Nobody's Reel, will take place December 1 8, 1993. Afinal demolition event will take place in May 1994. For more information call (713) 880-0862.

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n an economic climate that is not particularly supporti ve of arti stic pursuits and a political cl imate that craves a return to the old-fashioned neighborhood school over an embrace of cultu ral diver ity, 130 at-risk students in a Minneapoli s, MN school are using public art to di scover the poss ibilities for community building.

Northeast Middle School is located in a white, middle-class neighborhood, but the kids who attend classes there come fro m all parts of the city and from a full mix of racial and ethnic backgrounds. They are bused in and they are bused out of the neighborhood. Two years ago, art teacher Rose Curran devised a mu ral project fo r students to help break down rac ial barriers. The bri ghtl y colored, 80-foot- Iong painting that students created on the theme of cultural di versity is a coll age of cultural icons and ethni c sy mbols running the gamu t fro m a Viking explorer to Bart Simpson, fro m Egyptian hieroglyphics to an "X." Looking at the completed schoo l cafeteria mural in s pring 1992, Curran, principal Larry Lucio, and artist-in-residence Pat Benincasa couldn ' t help but notice that an adj acent empty courtyard was an obv ious space fo r another art project. " It hits you over the head," said Benincasa.

The large courtyard , 64 by 177 feet, is set between two buildings con tructed in 1952 and 1954. Glass window-wall hall ways connect the building at both ends. For fo ur decades, the courtyard had been left largely unused. Fourtrees had grow n up against the background of the

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18 PUBLIC ART REVIEW FALUWINTER 1993

Place

pastel green, pale slate blue, and ochre red panels of the buildings. An original blueprint for the site shows that concrete ri sers were planned for the space but they were never built. And until spring 1992, no one had seen the need to develop the drab interior space.

The Gathering Place , as the project is now called, incorporates walkways, gardens, sculptures, benches, and tables, which have transformed the courtyard into a multiple-use space. The main features are an amphitheater-classroom with a painted floor, a performance stage with fences and banners for a backdrop, a rock garden, and a large kiosk that doubles as an exhibition stand. The site includes ramps and specially designed benches and tables for accessibility.

The Gathering Place is much more than the sum of its components.

Defined as a "Student and Community Partnership" and a "Public Art, Public Education, and Youth Service Learning Collaboration," the project combines public art and service learning in a direct, practical , and inspired way. The educational objectives ofthe project are to create interdisciplinary, educational, and service learning experience; to extend education beyond traditional classroom through service learning; to become civic partners in the community; to develop ownership and self esteem; to develop life skills; and to extend the classroom into the community.

Worki ng with Curran and Benincasa, a group of teachers designed a curriculum that couples specific facets of the public art process with classroom learning. An art class designed paintings in concrete. A math class completed a purchasing plan for all the construction material s. A science class raised garden plants from seed. An indus-

ABOVE: Pat Benincasa, The Gathering Place, (model), Northeast Middle School, Minneapolis, 1992. (photo: artist) LEFT: Pat Benincasa and students experimenting with concrete at Northeast Middle School, Minneapolis, MN, during the development of The Gathering Place, 1993. (photo: courtesy artist)

trial arts class is working with profess ional carpenters as the project heads toward its completion date this Thanksgiving. Other classes that have worked on the project include indu stri al technol ogy, business, and photojo urnali sm.

The sixth-, seventh- , and eighth-grade students have poured themselves into this alternative educational process. It' s been a real handson experience for them to help design, develop, and build a public space in their school that will be shared with the surrounding communi ty. They have learned necessary skill s, helped write and sketch plans, and will do much of the wo rk to build up the space. They are polling the needs of neighborhood groups about a range of uses and programs for the fi ni shed site.

The stude nt body and the neighborhood were almost li ke strangers to each other. Benincasa expl ained that The Gathering Place took the concept of service learning one step further: "It's about community building, not si mpl y building something for the community."

"Public art has a different set of social assumpti ons than archi tecture," she said . Art, politics, cultural issues, and social agenda are all valid concerns in Benincasa's view of public art. She was trained in studio arts as an oil painter but developed a fascination with public art when she had a chance to wo rk as an assistant to S iah Armaj ani , constructing models for the well-known arti st. Eve ntuall y she reached a point at which, "I didn ' t know what painting was anymo re. I would put a painting on the wall , and it just seemed static and boring."

Benincasa teamed up with artist Michael Pilla and won a 1989 Minnesota State Arts Board competiti on fo r an atrium in the Minnesota Judicial Ce nter in St. Paul. Her intri cate glass des ign fo r a skylight wiiJ project shapes and colors of moving water against a shoreline. The project is set to be compl eted in August 1994.

Even though Benincasa's entrance into the fi eld of public art was a collaboration fo r an architectural space in a percent- fo r-art program, she has since worked o n proj ects wi th a communi ty base. Her design for achildre n's reading room at a library in Appl e V alley, MN was approved, but fund s have not been raised. She also worked with the Lex-Ham Neighborhood Association in St. Paul to des ign a park amphitheater and "tot lot" to be constructed of salvaged timbers from a rai sed bridge the community had saved. Again, fund s were not rai sed, but Benincasa co ntinues to be involved now that: the project has shifted to using sal vaged iron girders that other arti sts may wo rk with .

While the Minneapoli s School Board approved the proposal for The Gathering Place in April 1993 , the funding for the project has come entirely from other sources, including small grants and grassroots donations. The $40,000 budget covers the cost of construction materials, landscaping, design de velopment by a structural engineer, construction services, and other basics. The grants gene rated by the project team of school staff and students have already raised most of the budget, and the students' labor, along with a wide variety of inkind donations and ass istance from the community, ha ve kept the budget low. Benincasa, a certified arts instructor, will work during the 1993-94 school year as a public artist-in-residence funded by the

Minnesota State Arts Board Artists in Education Prog ram.

With the help of Howard Root, the Northeast Community Educatio n director, the school team has made important ties with community groups and local businesses . In May 1993, a "Bow lathon" fundraiser at a local bowling alley ra ised $5,200 with some 240 bow lers contribu ting, including empl oyees of AT&T, a business partner with Northeast Middle School.

While the educatio nal challenges for the stude nts are significant, the success of the project has hinged on developing a broad co ll aborati on of people and groups. Wi thout the enthusias m of the staff, students, and community leaders, Th e Gathering Place would be just another cl assroo m ex periment, just another ornamental space.

"The definiti on of commun ity has changed," said Benincasa.

"We've shifted from what was defined by loca le tocivic intent. There is an ass umption that peo ple are community resources."

In coll aboration with a program called Artstart, with funding fro m The Minnesota Center fo r Arts Education, the students working o n The Gathering Place produced a short radi o story for Minnesota Public Radi o. Rather th an simpl y describe the pl an fo r the project in "Soundscape: The Gathering Pl ace," the students ex pl ored their responses to questi ons such as " Do you have a pl ace?" or "Do yo u make a place?" To create this "landscape in your mind," they answered with poems, descripti ons of their artwo rk, observati ons about their own pri vate and public sides, and comments on what it fee ls like to be worki ng on the project.

As students returned to Northeast Middle School for the 1993-94 school year, they saw the results of the science cl ass horticulture project that have fl owered, the new path ways of pavers that have been laid, and the concrete pilings that were poured to build on. When they fini sh building The Gathering Place , the heart ofthe project will open up fo r them. A physical educati on teacher pl ans to organi ze a winter carni val with ice sculptures . The science cl ass will be busy with seedlings as they prepare to use the garde n spaces as an environmental laboratory. They ' ll be organi zing a story hour fo r preschool neighborhood children to attend .

"Its use will make or break thi s project," said Benincasa.

Whe n students first cleaned up the courtyard , they saved a plaque that had been laid at the base of one of the trees and inscribed: "Edel E. Sholl , Memorial Garde n Court, April 28, 1967." No doubt, flowers had been pl anted that spring 25 years ago by students in honor of a beloved sc ience teacher who had passed away, but the "Garden Court" had been neg lected for many yea rs until The Gathering Place revived it. The plaque will soon be repl aced, the community will be in vited in, some stude nts will move o n to other schools at the end of the year, and next year new kids will arri ve on buses. It's the same school and the same neighborhood, but something has changed.

"Public art, when it' s done well , is invisible," concl uded Benincasa.

"It looks li ke it' s always been there."

David Skarjune is a Minneapolis writer and was the founding editor of Public A rt Review.

PUBLIC ART REV IEW FALUWINTER 1993 19

Gerhard Pagenstecher, Private in Public: No Longer Home on the Range, Pioneer Courthouse Square, Portland, OR, February, 1993. (photo: Richard Hovey)

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ne Friday morning at the end ofJanu ary las t year, stacks of curious yellow fliers '. announcing an afternoon protest appeared in cafes, restaurants, and shops all over downtown Portland, Oregon. The notices bore li ttle text, but they didn ' t need mu c h : "Packwood is in deep hiding. He must talk to us," More than 300 protesters responded by gathering near City Hall the day that Oregon Sen . Bob Packwood returned to Portland after an abse nce of more than two months. The beleaguered senator, who had been acc used of sex ual harass ment just weeks after the November electi on, was nowhere in sight. Nevertheless, with pickets and choreographed antics, the rabble played to the telev ision cameras to co mmuni cate its disgust. When reporters packed up afte r scarcely 45 minutes, the crowd began to disperse until onl y pigeons and a smattering of hangers-on remained.

Throughout this spectacle, barely five blocks away in the mostly vacant Pioneer Courthouse Square, artist Gerhard Pagenstecher and hi s crew of volunteers were quietly assembling another kind of statement. Pagenstecher, however, would deli ver his statement in cedar, steel , basa lt, and brass. By the following Sunday, the Portland artist had left hi s city a giant arc hitectural sculpture that would assert itself an entire month afte r the protesters disbanded, Instead of generating evening-news sound bites, Pagenstecher's temporary piece, Pri vate in Public: No Longer a Home on the Range, prov ided viewers with

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20 PUBLIC ART REVIEW FALUWINTER 1993

a position from which to view a process critical to democracy: dialog , A self- taught woodworker and furniture designer, Pagenstecher built the installation Public in Private: No Longer a Home on the Range for the public square in downto wn Portland. The project developed from hi s fascination with the nebulous confluence between private individuals and the public at large and his interest in breaking the Portland public art program 's dependence on percent-for-art capital construction projects. The immensely popular Pioneer Courthouse Square, a year-round site for dozens of concerts, protests and fes tivals, was the logical place for his piece, "Something like this has never been done, in my mind," explained Pagenstecher, an intense, slight 39-year old with a receding crop of bl ack-gray hair. "Not specifically in the square, but this is a combination of a sitespecific, temporary, but, more importantly, arti st-initiated work."

When assembled, the sculpture's monumental 20-foot -cubed frame of reddish, mattefinished steel girders, suggesting the outline of a house, sat atop a grid of bricks in the center of the square's eastern floor, where it confronted the old Pioneer Courthouse across the street. Yet the frame of this "house" had no walls and was therefore freely accessible to the public in the square. Exposed within the structure were several abstract signifiers of home furniture: four doors in their frames and three colossal "chairs," (each arranged in symmetrical, geometric patterns.)

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In the middle of the west side of the " house" sat the "Generative Chair," a cedar bench with an unfini shed steel back shaped in an organic, undulating swirl. Pagenstecher called this the "seat of conscious thought and decision-making," "the point from which the individual reads the work." From here, a sitter could view the center of the courthouse building across the street and could contemplate bits of texts littering the floor and doors of the house, such as "The country should be governed by those who own it."

From the comers of the east side of the "house," two other chairs faced the Generative Chair on diagonal axes: the "Ideal Chair," a massive chunk of basalt crowned with a perfectly circular halo of brass tubing; and the "Real Chair," an even mightier stone mounted with a fluid, warped, and imperfect but more kinetic twin of the former.

Within the triangle of chairs, a flat, immaculately polished stainless steel boat inscri bed with the lyrics from "Row, Row, Row Your Boat" pointed to Pioneer Courthouse, reflecting the inverted image of its dome.

Four life-sized wooden doors created diagonals that directed the viewer's eyes to the doors of the courthouse. Each had a themefamily, education, work, and citizenship--and was inscribed with quotations and text hinting abstractly about each concept.

Pagenstecher said that he chose the open architectural frame and its contents to explore the blurring of distinctions and tensions between private individual and general public. To that end, appropriately enough, the $75,000 piece was funded privately- by Pagenstecher and contractors who either donated or helped fabricate materialsand publicly by small grants from the Oregon Arts Commission and the City of Portland's Metropolitan Arts Commission. The initiative for the project was entirely Pagenstecher's. He approached the Pioneer Courthouse Square Authority with the idea, and they approved it.

From its inception, Private in Public was premised on the notion of education. In an attempt to win public grant money, including a National Endowment for the Arts "Art in Public Places" grant that he didn't recei ve, Pagenstechercollaborated with Portland Public Schools and local arts-in-education organizations to use the piece in an arts curriculum at the elementary, middle-, and high school levels.

"Education became an important realm to me," Pagenstecher remarked, "because the intent of the project-commentary on the democratic processes-is actually an educational one." Pagenstecher invited students to follow the design and fabrication ofthe piece. He met three times with elementary school classes that created their own artworks based on issues they gleaned from models of the piece and from discussions of it. Photography students from one !high school documented the project on film, while another gave readings from the sculpture when it was completed.

Pagenstecher meant for Private in Public to provoke public discussion which he considers critical to the democratic process. He hoped to suggest to the public that art can and must be a catalyst for such discussion to occur-and that the creation of public art ought not be contingent on percent-for-art architectural commissions.

"Artist-originated work is new ground here," he said. "But if an artist has an idea and wants to work in the public realm, there is a way.

It's not very easy-that's why it's not been done, on this scale, anyway."

Pagenstecher hesitated to specify what he had hoped to accomplish with this work, except to say that he wanted to provoke public discussion about the private citizen. On that point, Pagenstecher himself set the example: as a private citizen, he took upon himself the responsibility for catalyzing public discussion in Portland' s most central and prized public arena, Pioneer Courthouse Square.

Unfortunately, Private in Public's success was questionable. The piece didn ' t seem to have as much impact as it might have. Because it was a temporary project, Pagenstecher explained, it would have benefited from more publicity prior to assembly so that people would be aware of its presence and premise. This was a funding issue, he said. Pagenstecher sunk $15,000 of his own money into the development and publicity of the sculpture. Most of the piece now lies disassembled behind his studio. To date, he hasn' t recouped the loss.

"The value of the preparations for the success of that piece didn't match the cost of its realization," he said. "What I tried to do was just

too ambitious. But it was necessary for me to do."

In the frigid dawn on the last Friday in January, as anti-Packwood fliers were scattered throughout downtown Portland, and throughout the protest that formed in the bright afternoon and into the clear, chilling dusk, Gary Pagenstecher presided over his own little democracy. Had they worked separately, the individuals in his crew would have been powerless to erect the colossal sculptu re. In concert, they prevailed.

Wearing hardhats, boots, jeans, and tool belts, Pagenstecher' steam made a striking contrast to the leather-clad, shaved-headed kids and the immaculately dressed executives who watched the assembly from the stairs of Courthouse Square's amphitheater. Occasionally someone descended the stairs and picked up a flier explaining Pagenstecher's project. Of course, such curiosity was exactly what Pagenstecher wanted.

"Someone said it's pugnacious for the individual to assert a right like free speech, simply for the sake of it," he said . "You know, without a social context, what is the val ue of freedom of speech? Art can ask questions bigger than itself; it can facilitate di scussion of ideas."

G. B. Veerman is a Portland, OR-based journalist who writes about art, politics, and pop culture.

Gerhard Pagenstecher, Private in Public: No Longer Home on the Range, Pioneer Courthouse Square, Portland, OR, February, 1993. (photo: Richard Hovey)

PUBLIC ART REVIEW FALUWINTER 1993 21

_ee And insurance, and religion, and... b y

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Barilleaux

wylene Gallimard and Jean-Marie Mauclet dividle their time between making art and running a company that operates two French-style cafes. Their multimedia constructions and installations explore topics including religion, commerce, and contemporary Americana, and their cafes, Fast & French, Inc.---one located on Broad Street in a notable Charleston, SC, neighborhood, the other in a shopping center in Cary, NC, a suburb of Raleigh------<:ater to a steady, diverse clientele.

Born in France and now based in Charleston, GalJimard and Mauclet [Gal-i-mar and Mo-clay] are working to complete the second and third parts of "Portraits of America," an episodic trilogy based on their experiences in and responses to life in their adopted country. The first part, Holy City, was presented in the highly visible and somewhat controversial exhibition "Places with a Past: New SiteSpecific Art in Charleston," organized by independent curator Mary Jane Jacob for the 1991 Spoleto Festival U.S.A. Parts two and three are scheduled for completion and exhibition this fall and next spring.

While Holy City was commissioned and funded by the Spoleto Festival, the majority of the current budgets must come from the artists' personal income and independent fund-raising efforts. They received minor funding from the South Carolina Arts Commission for the second part of the project.

The title Holy City is derived from a nickname for Charleston; the piece explored the multiple facets of religion in the United States.

Insurance-Compassion for Sale, the second part, will investigate the diverse pubEc and private aspects of the insurance business.

Insurance will soon premier at the Tula Foundation in Atlanta. The third and sti ll untitled "portrait" will deal with American fast food and is scheduled for exhibition-along with Insurance -at the College of Charleston's Halsey Gallery.

Holy City is an outdoor installation whose main elements included a kiosk housing a video monitor, six audio tapes playing simultaneously, and a giant double-entry rubber book. The monitor played a video montage of the facades of about 120 churches around Charleston. The acco mpanying audio-text, consisted of voices speaki ng, chanting, and singing the names of approximately 400 local churches in English, French, and Gullah (a dialect spoken in the Carolina region). One viewer described it as something "between gos pel and rap."

In surance-Compassionfor Sale will involve fo ur components: si lkscreen images derived from video, which present the face of a new baby and an elderly woman; a sound montage; a recording

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22 PUBLIC ART REVIEW FALUWINTER 1993

and a listening booth for audience participation; and a pyramidshaped chest 002 drawers that contain information and commentary on the insurance business. Together these components will create an interwoven dialog within a noncommercial gallery space. The fastfood segment will be produced for a noncommercial gallery as well.

Holy City'S outdoor presentation made it a "public" work, as that term is traditionally understood. The two new works, which take the format of gallery exhibitions, find their home within a more expanded definition of public art whose parameters have been broadened to embrace and encourage work of other public nature. The topics these projects address are relevant to almost everyone in this country. The artists' ways of researching and executing them often take them outside the private world of their studio. The final presentations of these works will in some cases involve public interaction that links the creative process to viewers' own gallery experiences. (It's important to note, however, that only about one-half of the art produced by Gallimard and Mauclet is collaborative; each artist also works independently to produce an individual body of work.)

In the same way that Holy City is related to Charleston, the new pieces are related to the artists' business experiences. For administrators of small restaurants, both insurance and food are crucial elements. In some sense, the completed trilogy will reflect more of Gallimard 's and Mauclet's business than aesthetic concerns.

Their approach to the restaurant business reflects their interest in complex social interaction and provides a means by which the artists relate to other people as well as one in which patrons can interact with one another. The restaurant's non-traditional seating-all seats are at counters-provide no individual tables in their identically designed establishments.

Although many artists depend on regular employment to supplement their art, such jobs are often in fields where the employer is a large, structured institution; teaching and arts administration come to mind. By being their own bosses, Gallimard and Mauclet are in greater control of their time and finances, as well as of how they integrate themselves into the larger community. The revenue generated by Fast & French, Inc., allows the artists a certain amount of financial freedom to work outside the restrictions imposed by funding agencies and mainstream exhibition venues, or those resulting from creating small , salable works.

But along with creative control come numerous business problems.

This di scussion would remain incomplete without a short description of the restaurants themselves. In Charleston, Fast & French, Inc. , occupies the street level of a narrow twostory building on palmetto-lined Broad Street. It

caters to a colorful mix of regulars and tourists. The menu-classic bistro cuisine-expresses the personalities of the proprietors. The decor is clean, bright, and understated; the service is efficient and the food is excellent. The very similar North Carolina Cafe opened in a shopping center and was designed as a showcase for Gallimard ' sand Mauclet's modular restaurant concept. The artists remain interested in expanding their "unit" idea and seek partners to do so.

But several concerns about balancing the future career directions of Gallimard and Mauclet arise. What if their art production demands greater time and money and places a strain on their primary financial resource, the restaurants? How do they wish to be reg,uded within their local and regional communities-foremost as artists or as business people? Will they ever be more than Charleston restaurateurs?

Being a serious artist takes the same dedication as being successful in business. To combine the two endeavors takes uncommon talent, hard-work, trust, and understanding of people. For Gwylene Gallimard and Jean-Marie Mauclet, the workday begins twice daily. For these artists in Charleston, creativity has developed several f.aces .

Rene Paul Barilleaux is Director of exhibitions and collections!

Chief Curator of the Mississippi Museum of Art, Jackson, MS.

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arkness and light; intimacy and monumentality; rough-hewn masses and airy, volumetric spaces; brooding emotional metaphor and precise, mathematical geometry. Mary Ann Unger's artwork spans such polar extremes that it's sometimes difficult to imagi.ne it all comes from the same creative fount. Of course, public art created on percent-for-art commissions and art made for the gallery as a vehicle of personal expression necessari ly address different issues and demand different voices.

Still , in Unger's case the distinctions are unusually vivid. Her public works are volumetric, brightly colored architectural structures, rendered in a kind of geometric formalism that adds a ritualistic function and radiant presence to an open plaza. Her private works are solemn, heavy abstractions rich with intimations of mortality and loss, inspired by the artist's ongoing struggle with breast cancer, which began in 1985. Both genres fulfill different aspects of her psyche. "My public work is a celebration of joy and beauty; I take great pleasure from it," she notes over iced tea in her naITOW, adroitly compartmentalized East Village loft. And the other work? "Ido [it] because I have the need to do it; I need to deal with it."

In fact, Unger's initial forays into the field of public art were selffunded. Her first major work, Paradise As A Garden (1981), was an ensemble of hundreds of brightly-colored tablets, alTanged in a vast circle around four jazzy, treelike spires; unknowing visitors to New York's City College mistook it for an especially elaborate Christmas display. It was followed in 1985 by Tweed Garden, an assemblage of swelling columns that converged at the top like Gothic vaulting.

Made from wood (for budgetary reasons), these works established Unger's signature style

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of depicting a volume through a radial , planar skeleton, transforming solid architectural shapes into airy, seethrough forms. Over the late 1980s, Unger perfected this technique: often working with fabricators on site in painted aluminum, she created archways, posts, even temples, usually in bright, primary colors. These forms are not merely architectural, but also evoke natural geometries-trees, mushrooms, pinecones, pineapples.

Unger sees this work as a logical expression of her own fascination with natural form and her lifelong exposure to engineering. "All the men in my family are engineers," she notes, "my grandfather, my father, my two brothers." Unger herself "started out as a biochemist. .. physics can1e easy to me. But I always preferred the physical and visual to the theoretical . There's nothing I liked more than geometry." As much as she savors the design, Unger also relishes the problem-solving challenge behind making public work, the tactile reality of grappling with budgets, contractors, and advisory committees, and getting something built.

One of her most successful, and formidable, structures was Tower (1989), a dramatic, vertical kiosk located at a sports complex outside Phoenix, AZ. Standing over 30 feet tall and made of painted steel, Tower was inspired by the Spanish Mission ofSt. Xavier on the route to Tucson . "It was supposed to have bulletin boards on the inside," she observes. "Now it's taken on more of a ritualistic function. And you can get out of the sun."

In 1991 she completed her most monumental work yet-Ode to Tatlin, now permanently installed in front of the Aaron Copeland School of Music at Queens College. Recalling the exhilarating geometries of Ru ss ian Constructivism, the work creates an elliptical atrium outoftwo soaring, semicircular walls. These walls, however, are open and ribbed with arching vertical struts painted pumpkin on one side and teal on the other. Set in an empty plaza at the en-

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Mary Ann Unger, Across the Bering Strait, (parts 3 and 4), cement ver steel 1992¡93. (photo: artist) ,

"

trance to the building, the work function s both as a waiting area and as a grand yet welcoming entrance way and seems almost an extension of the architecture. Such functionali sm is as fulfilling to Unger as the formal design. "I'm not like Serra: 'This is my work.' I had to humanize the plaza, create traffic flow .. .I like to offer interior spaces," she adds. "The walls are like study carrels; kids play hide and seek in them."

In the middle of her public art push, in 1985, Unger was diagnosed with breast cancer. It was this sudden confrontation with mortality that compelled her to make darker art for herself. Besides serving as a catharsis for the artist, this other body of work allowed herto grapple openly with powerful , private emotions that might not be appropriate to a public forum. "Most public art is about history, culture, site," she notes. "Today, emotion in public art is not welcomed."

In the mid-1980s, Unger began a series of figurative works made of cast bronze or hydrocal , often in poses of beseeching or torment, which amounted to something of an artistic primal scream. But around 1988, she also began a body of large abstractions that culminated in a critically well-received 1992 solo show at the Klarfeld Perry Gallery in New York and that won her a Guggenheim grant that same year.

Made of hydrocal set on top of steel armatures, these mass ive pieces are at once simple and dramatic. Their surfaces are highly textured, almost scarred, and tinted with brilliant pigments like red or yellow, which electrify their otherwise bl ack ski ns. Their forms suggest basic body parts-bones, a tongue, a spine, an open wound. But they also recall archi tectural shapesin particular, the post-and-lintel structure. In works like Hanging Bone (1988) and Pall Bearers (1989), two posts support a heavy central element, symbolic of a dead body. In Piela (Monument To War) (1990), the central, concave piece reaches down to the floor, like a tongue, a womb, or a casket.

While the imagery may seem morose oreven gri sly, Unger's sy mboli sm also expresses healing, mourning, or consoling. The massive forms often support or wrap around each other, as for example in Lamentation (1989), or reach out to the viewer, as in Embrace (1989). Moreover, her sculpture also blends images of fertility with its darker symbolism, adding to the

work's complexity and leaving open the door to redemption. Trencher (1991 ), for example, resembles both a wound and a womb.

Sheaves (1990) depicts a bundle of long stems bundled within two supportive posts, like harvested stalks of grain. This work refers to the Greek myth of Demeter and Persephone: Demeter, the Greek Goddess of grai n, so mourned her daughter Persephone, who had been abducted by Hades, god of the underworld, that the earth ceased to produce life. Zeus forced Persephone's abductor to return her to her mother on earth for spring, summer and fall each year. Sheaves's reference to motherhood and seasonal harvest suggests a coming to peace with mortality through acceptance of one's place in the natural cycles of life.

Unger's newest work, an elaborate seven-part sculpture, Across the Bering Strait, brings together many of her signature forms-a series of low-cut posts supporting bundles of dark, elongated poles.

Ifthe title refers to the migration of ancient humans to North America, a topic which fascinates Unger, the work itself seems to stretch across the floor in yearning. But for where? Or what? "I don 't want to limit it," she demurs, relishing the open-endedness that comes from grappling with a difficult new work-in-progress. "I can make work even the gallery doesn't want to show," she boasts. "I do it for myself. I have to have that freedom . Otherwise, why did I give up being a normal, middle-class person?"

Over the last few years, Unger has begun creating outdoor sculptures of bonded iron that formally echo some of her private abstractions. But otherwise, she has not tried to integrate her two styles in her public work, nor does she feel compelled to. "It seems like forcing the issue, mixing apples and oranges," she concedes. Still, she holds out the poss ibility of bridging the divide. "I would like to do a War Memorial," she muses. "That's work that's both public and emotional ." And just for a moment, the two artists that are Mary Ann Unger collaborate in a slight, contemplative smi le.

George Melrod is a New York-based writer.

PUBLIC ART REVIEW FALUWINTER 1993 25

PART II

Mapping the Terrain: The New PubliC Art b

Y

s

u

zan

n

e

Lac y

Editor's Note: In Part I of "Mapping the Terrain " (PAR vol.

4, no. 2) public artist Suzanne Lacy discussed how current public art has been informed by diverse histories, including ethnic, feminist, and community-based art from the 1970s and '80s. Part 1/ defines various directions that public art may take in the last half of 1990s and into the twenty-first century. n considering the complexity of the current public art scene as described in Part I, we are led to a new definition of public art, one that is not bound by its phy sical placement. The interrogation of "public"- including arts' interactive qualities, the artist's intentions, and the audience composition-defines this work. This action is a continuation of conceptual and process efforts to shilt attention away from the object and toward the meaning of art and artmaking.

Within the ranks of the artists who enacted the alternative public art history related in Part I, were several who, having anticipated the shift, created road maps for current practice.

Concerned with issues of race, gender, sexuality, ecology, and urbanization for almost 20 years, these artists developed theoretical perspectives and activist strategies that have since been held up as models for the new public art.

I

The Territory in Question The stage has been set.

Enter the various players, each with a different history but similar concerns, aesthetic language, and questions. Next we must review the integral link between the present time and the work of these public artists toward developing a critical dialog. For the past several years some cri tics ha ve addressed these artists on their own terms, struggling to convey the meani ng inherent in actions not normally considered art and objects that are sometimes secondary to other artistic concerns. The difficulties of evaluation have much to do with the current boundaries of aesthetics-what is and is not art. Yet, artists ' investigations of the "public" have gained momentum and the task forcritic:s today is to catch up, to develop new standards of judgement, and to connect the present moment to its historical antecedents.

To begin, let us survey issues raised by the artists, critics,

and curators during the "Mapping the Terrain" symposium and retreat, and a subsequent panel discussion at the College Art Association, that provide a multi-vocal overview of the territory in question : Quotations are used liberally from those discussions to point out the collective and additive nature of the dialog. Taken together, the concerns of these artists outline tendencies, characteristics, and areas to further investigate.

What emerges is the beginning of a formal language for the new public art. Themes considered include social analysis, a sense of responsibility, the role of the audience, and the role of the artist.

The new public artwork incorporates an analysis of society and culture "Most of the work I'm doing currently comes, I think, from the realization that we're living in a state of emergency.

There are many ways our lives are framed by a sinister kind of "Bermuda Triangle," the parameters of which are AIDS, (the) recession, and political violence. I feel that, more than ever, we must step outside of the strictly (defined) art arena. It is not enough to make art. "-Gui llermo GomezPeiia, performance artist, writer and theorist.

The broader context of political and social life is never far from reference in the works of these artists, critics, and curators. Varying degrees of urgency are reflected, but in all, the fate of the world is seen as of primary concern. "I feel a great urgency in my own work," said San Francisco muralist and educator Juana Alicia, "to address the issues of our destruction and not to make works of art that keep our society dormant at a time when someone like David Duke can run for, and possibly be elected to an office of importance in this country." Social theory, in one form or another, is linked closely with the making of art, and its expression is taken as the prerogati ve of the artist as well as of the curator and critic.

Some of the artists place their emphasis on "otherness," marginalization, and oppression. Others' analyses are based on the impact of technology. Some draw from the ecology movement, others from theories of modem and postmodern culture. As might be expected, feminist and racial politics are centrally evident. The potential role of art in maintaining, enhancing, creating or challenging privilege are underlying themes. Power relationships are thought to be exposed in the very process of creating culture-from making news to making art. "We need to find ways not to educate audiences for art, but to truthfully address the relations of power that have been governing cultural activity," said independent curator Lynn Sowder, "and build structures that share that power inherent in making culture with as many people as possible. How can we

Suzi Gab ik, Sheila de Brelleville, and Patricia Phillips t the Mapping the Terrain : The New Public A t symposium, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, November 14, 1991. (photos: Rolando dal Pezzo)

Juana Alicia, La Promesa de Lorna Prieta: que nose repita la historia (The Promise of Lorna Prieta: That History Not Repeat Itself), University of CA, Santa Cruz, Oakes College.

21 x 21 interior acrylic mural, 1992. (photo: Marvin Collins)

change the disposition of exclusiveness that lies at the heart of cultural life in the United States and embrace the mess that is democracy?"

Despite differences among the artists, there is an overlap of concerns and a consensus that fo llows a liberal or radical agenda. As the poet/sculptor team of Estella Conwill Majozo and Houston Conwill stated in their presentation of their work with collaborator Joseph De Pace, "We address issues of world peace, human rights, rights of the physically challenged, democracy, memory, cultural identity, loss, cultural diversity, pro-choice, ecology and caring; and

the common enemies of war, hatred, racism, classicism, censorship, drug addiction, age-ism, apartheid, homophobia, hunger, poverty, joblessness, pollution, homelessness, AIDS , greed, imperialism, cross-cultural blindness, and fear of the other."

With these new public artists, there is no negation of the importance of other' s concerns, nor an attempt to prioritize them. Seeking consensus seems to be at the very core of their working methods. As Lucy Lippard, critic and activist, suggested, "The Eurocentric view of the world is crumbling. Nothing that does not include the voices of people of color, women, of lesbians and gays can be considered

PUBLIC ART REVIEW FALUWINTER 1993 27

inclusive, uni versal, or healing. To find the whole we must know and respect all the parts." Perhaps most interesting, given the litany of social ills that are the subject of thi s wo rk, there is li ttle despair or cynicism. Optimism is a generic res ponse, though tempered with political reali sm. A problem with criticizing thi s work is whether, or how to evaluate the artist's choice of subjects and social analysis.

Each analys is or statement of conditions during the symposiumwhich served as an express ion of an artist's intenti ons as wellincluded a social role fo r visual arti sts. Ofte n the distancing of artists from the rest of society was part of the social critique. "What I find myself thinking about most these days," said Jennifer Dowley, director of the Headl ands Center for Art, " is the isolation of artists fro m our cultu re. It seems that as society declines both economical ly and sociall y there's an even stronger need for the ki nd of humani sm and creativity that arti sts provide. Paradoxically, artists [today] are more spurned and discounted than ever."

Longing fo r a centralized position is often countered by the artist's confl icting desire to remai n outside as a social critic. Whether, or in what ways it is possible to be simultaneously inside and outside the culture is another question to be explored further in thi s work.

Artists evaluate personal responsibility in their work " Public art in the Eurocentric cul tures has served the value systems and the purposes of an unbroken hi story of patriarchal domin ant behavior that has despoiled the earth and its inhabitants and seri ously threatens the future. Responsible social intervention must hold up a di fferent image. It must advance other va lue systems. In these terms responsible means putti ng into the world what we can all live with and survive." Jo Hanson, San Francisco public and install ation artist.

The definiti on of what constitutes beneficial intervention by artists, and of exactl y what is responsibili ty in aesthetic terms, is part of a li vely dialog with no shared conclusions, perhaps best described as relating to the artists' intentions. The social responsibility questio ns raised by Hanson are the most easily identifia ble ex pression of intentio n in thi s work. Less obvious are the implications of the internal relationship between artist and maki ng.

The psychological, spirituaI, and ethical dimensions of thi s work are still superfic ially viewed by the artists, who seem preoccupied with the social aspects of their work. Yet more than a few artists temper their reformatory zeal with a sense that, in complex ways, an internalized agenda is being externalized through their art. "Fritz Perls calls responsibility 'response-ability,' [one's] abili ty to respond," said John M alpede, Los Angeles performance artist. "Obligation he call s a synonym for megalomania. So responsibi lity is the abili ty to respond to [one' s] own needs." Maturity brings an awareness of the fa llibility of our own conceptions of "good" for others, and that presents an on-going dilemma fo r these artists. One task fo r the critic will be to speculate on how the structural, temporal, and iconographi c nature of thi s work is shaped by the artists' internalization process.

All an Kaprow, theori st and arti st, strikes a balance between internal and external necessity. "It's not onl y the transformation of the public consciou ness that we are interested in, but it's our own transformation as artists that's important. Perhaps a corollary to thi s is that community change can't take place unless it's transformati ve within us. That Jules Pfe iffer cartoon, 'I see the enemy and it is l'

28 PUBLIC ART REVIEW FALUWINTER 1993

means that every prejudice, every misunderstanding that we perceive out in the real world is inside of us, and has to be challenged." Thi s philosophical positioning of "self' in context is a characteristic of this work, even though hardl y considered by critics. Here, at least, there is a common ground with all visual arti sts who portray an epistemology with their art. As is often the case, it remai ns the task of the artist to bring forward this perspecti ve.

Strong human relationships, forged through this work, are often maintained by the artists over time and di stance. Part of their humanistic style, it has obvious political implications in continuing and enhancing the changes set in motion by the work. When John Malpede travels outside his home in Los Angeles to work with the homeless in another city, he may link these people with local activists and initi ate social action in the process of creating a performance.

"When we work in other communities, I feel like there are two different things we can offer to local arti sts. One [of those] is how to mai ntai n the work after we leave, logistically speaking."

The notion of sustaining or continuing a connection begun through the work is an expression of personal responsibility that has a pedagogical thrust, often expressed as educating engaged community members, students, or even the art world. This pedagogy is rarely as doctrinaire as its critics would have it. Rather, the artist imparts a range of options for developing acti vist and aesthetic work, generall y on the constituency's own terms. "The other thing we can offer [to a community] is an aesthetic structure they can transform and carry on," said Malpede. "Some community artists get involved and want to keep going, but they have a compl etely different aesthetic agenda than our own, and then it' s like, 'Good! Do that! ' It's really important that people have a strong artistic vision . It doesn' t have to be congruent with ours."

It the arti st does have stated political intentions-and the overtness of this varies from artist to artist-then continuity may be a measure ofthe work's success. "It has to be sustained ... you can' t have a fl ash in the pan and expect that's going to change the town," said Judy Baca, Los Angeles muralist and theorist. The issue of continuity is a crucial one for new public art, taxing the resources of a funding and support system built around installations and exhibitions in controllable spaces.

"It's hard work, because you have to keep multiplyi ng the process, and you have to keep multiplying the leadership," said Anna Halprin, a dancer and performance artist from San Francisco. The emotional and physical demands on such artists are high in this labor intensive work. The financial costs of working with extended time frames in the development of the work are rarely built into most public art budgets, and artists who work in regions outside their own home are faced with perplexi ng questions. Some resolve this by working locally within their communities, over extended periods of time. Others grapple with problems inherent in contemporary life, building relationships that include physical distance, mai ntaining connections over time.

Some critics have questioned whether or to what degree this can be successful in terms of social change. Pedagogical and political responsibility leads to a healthy self-c riticism. "Public arti sts as acti vists run fro m issue to issue chasing fires," said Peter Pennekamp, radio producer and acti vist. "Not because they' re not concerned, but because there's the next issue ... the shear number of major social issues. Maybe a better way is to look at who ~s setting the fires and working more centrally at the causes." Exactly what art can and should be able to accomplish is not clear here. For some, no less than concrete changes of social behaviors is demanded. For others, art is

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successful when it educates, or when it serves as a model for other artists . This raises the question as to whether this work is in fact an agent of change or whether it serves as a model for social change; whether the art is frankly and solely goal-oriented or, as I've suggested, is a more complex investigation of philosophical and personal meaning.

Relationship is a metaphor for a work of art's structUJre " Whatever [ did publicly I wanted the experience of at least one.

I was thinking of one person in the general public to whom my work would speak." -Leopoldo Maler, Argentinean installation and performance artist.

The tenants of individual accomplishment and novelty--so much a part of the modernist art practice-die hard. Even among these artists one detects ambivalence toward notions of originality and authorship. "The prestige of individualism is so high in our culture," said Suzi Gablik, theorist. "It has completely structured artistic identity. My sense is that we have finally come up against the limits of that particular paradigm and that there is a real yearning now for a sense of community and intimacy that has been otherwise lost in modern culture. What is involved here is a shift in our understanding of the self as relational and interactive, ratherthan as an identity in isolation."

All art posits a space between the artist and the viewer. Where traditionally filled with the art object, this new public art space is filled with the relationship between artist and audience. For some artists, that relationship is the artwork. This premise calls for a radically different approach to art making and a different set of skills. For example, "juxtaposition" as an aesthetic practice may mean bringing together people of diverse cu ltures within the structure of the work, exploring similarities and differences as part of a dialogic practice. Building constituencies might have as much to do with how the artist envisions the overall shape and rhythm of a work as it does with developing an audience. This is translated directly into techniques and approaches that become part of the artists' expanded repertoire. "We can't do works without talking with people on the site," said Conwill. "We do a tremendous amount of talking to people in the communities that we work in ... and it's a transformative experience. It transforms the work and it transforms us."

This mode of conversation may be said to describe not only a way of gathering information but a way of conceptualizing and extending the artists' form language. The voices of others speak through this artwork, often quite literally. Of her project in Little Tokyo in Los Angeles, Sheila de Bretteville says, "It matters to me that their names and the dates on which they said it are there, because they're speaking and I' m not mediating their speech. I'm not interpreting it. I'm simply gathering it and giving it form for others."

The skills need for this relational work are communicative in nature, a stretch for the imaginations of artists and critics used to the mono-logic and studio-based model of art. Suzi Gablik calls for a different kind of art, "one that is more empathic and interactive and comes from a gentle, diffused mode of listening. That is to say, that it leads to a kind of art that cannot be fu lly realized through monolog.

It can only come into its own in dialog, in open conversation in which one is obli ged to listen and include other voices."

This transition from a model of individual authorship to one of collective relation hip is not undertaken simply as an exercise in political correctness. There is a longing for "the other" that runs as a

deep stream through most of these artists' works, a desire for connection that is part of the entire creative endeavor in all its forms.

At the Mapping the Terrain retreat, Con will Majozo spoke of the structural components of Blues as a model for the art that links African American history to current community. " In blues .. .I find the notion of twining, connected with "the other" .. .how one finds in the search that the perceived two are one at the end" This relational model, whether expressed psychologically or politically, draws upon a spiritual concept of art. Artists express their connection, through memory, to ethnic, gender, orfamilial traditions.

They talk about their habitation of the earth as a relationship with it and all people who live there. These are essentially ethical and religious assertions founded in a sense of service and a need to overcome the dualism of a separate self. That dilemma is played out not only between self and other, but between perceived public and private components of the artist's self. "I think this sense of what it means to be a social persona and the fact that every social person has a private person inside is vital to the sense of community and to any meaningful sense of ' public'-of public service," said Kaprow . "The way to get to those issues sometimes is organizational and structural , but often it has to do with compassion, with play, with touching the inner self in every individual who recognizes that the next individual has a self very much like that, suffers very much like that.

That commun ity, whether literal or metaphorical , is in fact the real public that we as artists might address."

Empathy begins with the self reaching out to another self, an underlying dynamic offeeling oremotions that becomes the source of activism. Whether or not one wants to discard the model of isolated authorship (and I personally do not), it is certainly not the only possible alternative for visua l artists. The work of these artists suggests that another fundamenta l premise is being constructed-that creati ve works can be a representation of, or an actual manifestation of relationship. One significant relationship is between the artist and his or her audience.

There is a... desire

for connection that is part of the entire

creative endeavor in all its forms.

30 PUBLIC ART REVIEW FALUWINTER 1993

Audience appears as an originating force Perhaps one of the most distinguishing characteristics of this work is the inclusion of audience into the actual construction of the work.

In art history, the consideration of the "viewer's share" is termed "reception theory ." New public art activates the viewer, creating a participant, even collaborator. It might be said that all art takes its audience into account, even if only in the subconscious mind of the artist working for some imaginary other. One traditional notion oflate modern art suggests that, if this is true, it's not something one ought to admit-as if making art for anyone other than oneself is a failure of the imagination. The make-up of the audience for art was not scrutinized, but assumed to be largely white, middle class, and knowledgeable in contemporary art. Artists worked for each other, a select few critics, and potential buyers.

Given both the analysis of "the other" central to theories of marginalization and the desire for relationship discussed in the preceding section, it was inevitable that the audience would become increasingly prominent as this form of public art developed. "Where before the audience was prepared through various museum programs to like the work of public art," said Mary Jane Jacob, independent curator from Chicago. "Or, such a work was left for a time to soften the blow so that reactions to it were mediated in some way (in other words, we would get used to it, or forget about it), in this truly public art the audience is very much engaged, from the start, in the process of this making. "

John Malpede, addressing students, churchgoers, artists, and homeless people from a shelter at the Unitarian Church, Oakland, CA. Immediately preceding his talk, over 150 homeless people were served a free chicken dinner in the spacla. (photo: Cisco Garcia)

As one begins to articulate forms of actual, rather than metaphoric engagement, it is necessary to come to terms with exactly who one is speaking to. "When she abandons certain mythologies of public in order to create new ones, the artist cannot be dismissive about the realities of place," said Patricia Phillips, New York-based critic.

Potential audiences are real people found in real places. Bearing witness to an identifiable person or group challenges the monolithic image of audience that has been enshrined in the value systems and criticisms oflate modern art. "We're a long way from .. .a comprehensive audience," said Jacob. "We still divide up according to value and belief systems, which mayor may not correspond one and the same to ethnic and other divisions we talk about. But locating and expanding that audience is the key goal here, and for these reasons public art is the key arena for contemporary art and ideas."

Audience is no longer a given, nor is it singular. Artists are beginning to conceptualize complex and multiple audiences, including integral participants, occasional viewers, and the art world itself as distinct groups. The content of the artwork defines its audience groupings, as does the venue. These influences are reciprocal, with choices of venues effecting the content as well. This amounts to a more fluid and process-oriented approach to the audiences for art.

"Who is the public now that it has changed color?" said Baca. The single most explosive idea to the myth of a coherent and generalized art audience has come from the recognition of difference. "An earlier, heroic and modernist idea of public art suppressed the significant differences, while looking for some sort of normative and central idea of public," said Phillips. "The big question for public artists and for critics is how do we develop a public art that acknowledges and supports and enriches these differences at the same time discovering ... how these differences contribute to an idea

of public life that is, in fact, a kind of common ground?"

In art, as elsewhere, the sustainability of difference is linked to the distribution of acknowledgement and, ultimately, resources. Artists survive psychologically and less often financially on the recognition meted out by the various art establishments-galleries, museums, magazines, and schools. The barricades are defended by notions of "quality," but the real issue is power. "There 's a real resistance to sharing that power," said Pennekamp."And, understand that if you really share the power, you change the aesthetic. Ultimately the control is over the aesthetic." Ethnic minorities have challenged the assumptions of culture premi sed in the work of white makers, as have feminists whose theory of differences has effectively demonstrated the patterns of dominance deeply embedded in the language and symbols of representation. "In the future, whose idea of beauty and order will be in public spaces?" said Baca. "That is perhaps the greatest question we have to face. You can look at a landscape and see it as perfect in itself. Or you can look at it as undeveloped land . Who will make the public art in that space?"

The road to reconciling differences is not as straightforward as we might have thought 10 years ago. "We' re still working on dismantling all those old bi-polar oppositions," said De Bretteville. "And the differences between the center and the edge. All those centers and all those margins are really parts of a very large framework of centers and margins [taken] together. I think we don't ask that we have thi s community with unity. We get community without unity, without understanding, accepting all the different parts without having to really truly understand everything, because there are some places where we truly can't."

Ambiguity and paradox lies at the heart of this artwork, a recognition that comes from active participation in the realities of community. Differences, whether reconciled or simply tolerated, must be

PUBLIC ART REVIEW FALUW1NTER 1993 31

accommodated somehow within the artwork. "We all have multiple identities and that's how we cope with things. To take any of li S as simpl y a two dimensional system is to really not understand," said Peter Jemi son, curator, administrator and artist. "We all have distinct backgrounds, but a common foreground."

Negotiation is tricky within the complicated field introduced through the destruction of a unified art audience. Where and how the artist locates her voice within the work's structure is critical, as is the representation of the community voice. What if there is disagreement? This practical question figures significantly in the controversies involving art censorship, and functions like a complex mantra at the heart of thi s new form of public art. "One of the big challenges that we're going to have to figure out in this country and in democracy, is the role of individual s and communities-individuals and their freedom and communities and their rights, or standards," said David Mendoza, Executive Director of the NationaJ Campaign for Freedom of Expression. "How do we make those two things come together in some way that still allows us to be very different but live together?"

The expansion of a diversified audience presence within the work leads us back to issues considered in the first section of this essaythose of power, privilege, and the authority to claim the territory of representation. Inevitably, this work forces the reconsideration of the possible "uses" of artwork in the social context, and the roles of the artist as an actor in the public sector.

Artists' roles are conceptualized in new ways When "public" begins to figure prominently in the artmaking equation, the staging area for art becomes potenti ally anyplacefrom newspapers to public rest rooms, from shopping malls to the sky. These expansive venues aJlow not only for a broader reach but ultimately a more integrated role for the artist in society. "Perhaps in the nineties," mused Gomez Pena, "artists and intellecltuaJs will finally command a role for the artist in society . Perhaps a multiraciaJ group of arti sts and arts organizers wiIJ head a 'Mini stry of Cultural Affairs. ' Perhaps there will even be a Ministry of Cultural Affairswith a budget equivalent to that of other countries! Perhaps there will be at least five cultural TV channels in every city, and every independent film and video art piece can be available in the 10caJ video store. " In finding new ways to work, artists have drawn on models outside the arts to re-interpret their roles. Kaprow caJled attention to the inherently pedagogical nature of art in a series of articles in the 1970s called, "The Education of the Un-Artist." "Artist as educator" is a construction that follows from political intentions. "If art is to ever play a role in the construction of shared social experience, it must indeed re-examine its pedagogical ass umptions, re-framing strategy, and aesthetics in terms of teaching," said Rick Bolton, writer and artist. This was well understood by feminist artists of the '70s whose ideas about art were developed around issues of authority, representation, hi storical revision, and the pedagogicaJ effects of public di sclosure on political systems. As audiences for women's art became more public-mandated by the breadth of the artists' aspirations for change-the discursive aspects of the work were as urgent as the aesthetic. Medi a appearances, cl asses, exhibitions, discussion groups, public demonstrations, consultations and writings. were all developed as integral to the artwork, notas separate activities. "When the artist designs the program, as well as the work of art--or shall I say when the artistic strategies become one with the educational events-we have a new way of thinking about the purpose of the education and the work as a totality," said Jacob. "The process that involve all of these acti vities needs to be recognized as the central part of the work of art. We' re not just taJking about a final product or an object to which all else is preliminary."

A more thorough anal ysis of the various claims artists make for reorgani zing their roles is needed to keep from substituting one set of mythologies for another. Some ideas clarify and others simply confuse. Said Kaprow , "Maybe this generation, we are unloading the myth of the artist, the myth of immediate gratification, of genius, of superiority, and entering the more real space of di sappointments, of slow processes that need to be undertaken before something can be changed."

At the Mapping the Terrain symposium, man y suggestions were

32 PUBLIC ART REVIEW FALUWINTER 1993

put forward. Yolanda Lopez invoked a model of citizenship: "Within the context of the good citizen , and exercising the social contract between the citizen and the state, the artist works within the intimate space of community life." Artist Helen Harri son suggested, "We artists are myth-makers and we participate with everybody else in the social construction of reality ." In a fanciful flight of metaphor, Gomez Pena suggested that artists are "media pirates, border crossers, culturaJ negotiators, and community healers." These metaphoric references drawn from outside the arts imply a different construction of visuaJ arts practice, and must be criticaJly investigated for meaning.

Critics and Curators The critic's role is to spread the word, propagate ideas, conceptualize and network publicly with artists. We're mediums. And we need to help find complex and diverse ways to connect the private and the public, the personal and the political.-Lucy Lippard As a curator, I do become involved in the creative process. The curator becomes a collaborator, a sounding board, and ultimately a fa cilitator. It 's very important to playa role of giving permission, if you will, that anything is possible while we' re thinking about how to create a work.-Mary Jane Jacob Critics and curators who work with the new public artists actively participate in the ethos and assumptions of thi s art. They see themselves as contextualizing and expanding the artist's reach. There is often a considerable overlapping of function s between the disciplines: artists and curators write critically, critics and curators work collaboratively with artists, critics curate, and curating other's artworks as part of a larger work is an accepted artistic strategy .

Whether she works inside or outside of institution s, the curator presents and promotes the artwork to both the art world and to society at large. Increasingly curators align themselves with the artists' visions for expansive audiences. "I' d like to build bridges, linkages between what artists are thinking and doing to our daily lives, said Dowley. "I' d like to provide our culture with access to the ideas of artists, to pursue situations where artists can re-engage as part of the mainstream di scourse, where they can participate as citizens. I'd like to explore situations where artists are activators, articulators-legitimate participants in the community, not offering benedictions or accusations fro m the sidelines." With aspirations such as these, curators support the artists' belief that visual art can play a larger role in setting the cultural agenda.

In addition, some curators, having worked for years with artists of this genre, have adopted artists ' educational and outreach strategies, or arrived at the same point following a similar analytic process.

Experimenting with presentational venues and curatorial styles, they serve as educators for the profession as well as lay audiences, even initiating younger artists into interactive modes by making such possibilities available. They facilitate opportunities for the artists to work within the community by contacting community groups, arranging resources, and planning informational and educational acti vities. Some notable curatorial projects in the past few years have adopted models inherent in earlier public artworks, taking on roles formerly assumed by the artists.

The critic provides the written context that expands the artwork's potential range of meanings, explains it to different audiences, and relates this activity to the history and contemporary practices of art.

Most important, the critic evaluates, describing the standards by which the work will be meas ured, and points out flaw s in thinking.

Their scrutiny is vital, as it is too easy to simply applaud a work's social intentions at the price of its aesthetics, or, conversely, to ignore them. The critical task is not an easy one, since we've tended to separate our political and aesthetic language in this country since the ascendancy of formalist criticism in the 1940s. "It seems to me that arriving at some sort of a model (for criticism) involves getting past this bifurcation between the aesthetic and the social ," said Patricia Fuller, public art curator and consultant. "There 's a hole there and someone has to figure out how to negotiate the territory, because thi s duali sm just doesn' t explain the work." New public art calls for an integrative critical language where values, ethics, and social respon-

Judith 8aca, standing in front of her mural: Triumph of the! Heart, 1990, (photo: SPARC: Social & Public Art Resource Center) sibility can be discussed in terms of art.

The artwork, in its physicallity, is difficult to separate from the various explanations artists offer. The points just covered--having to do with social analysis, the model of relationship in the work, and so on-form the framework for the work and must be analyzed for the insights they provide on work processes and artistic intentions.

Assumptions about authorship, beauty, and what constitutes a successful work might change with an understanding of the artist's theoretical constructions, and some knowledge of these seems necessary to understand the artwork fully. For example, Judy Baca suggests two working models that might result in two different critical treatments: "In some productions where you are going for the power of the image, you can get a massive amount of inpu~ from the community before the actual making of the image, then you take control of the aesthetic. That's one model. Another is a fully collaborative process in which you give the voice to thecommunilty and they make the image. Both of these processes are completely valid, but there's little room for the second because artists take such huge risks becoming associated with a process that may not end up as a beautiful object. The confusion is massive when you talk to people who are writing about it- whose art is it, the kids' , the homeless', or yours?"

What is meant by effective and what will be taken as the measure of success are still matters of di verse and often unformulated opinion.

An important corollary question is how do we measure contributions to the social whole, if this is the site of the artist's intentions? In early attempts to deal with this work, some critics suggested that the relationship of the artist's political intention to measurable changes could be used. Such ideas reflect the dualistic conundrum at the heart of critical thinking about this work-is it art, or is it social work?

Methods traditionally used to measure change, drawn from the political or social sciences, are rarely applied. The apparatus for doing so isn't in place, and even if it were, we are reluctant to reduce our critical evaluation to one of numbers or even, for that matter, to personal testimonies. Concrete results in the public sphere may occasionally be illustrative of a work's success, but fall short as they do not capture all the varied levels on which art operates.

Leaning too far in the direction of evaluating the work's social claims, critics have frequently avoided struggling equally with its artistic goals . One of the reasons is that, in general , our current critical language has a more difficult time coming to terms with the aesthetic meaning of any process art. "Processes are also metaphors.," said Jeff Kelly, writer and educator. "They are powerful containers of meaning. You have to have people [critics] who can evaluate the qualities of a process, just as they evaluate the qualities of a product. There's a false dichotomy here that's always talked about, even by us, between objects and processes. Anytime we objectify consciousness, it's an object in a sense, a body of meaning. That body can be grasped and respected. Looking at a product at the end, or looking only at the

social good intentions or effecti veness of the work, is certainl y not the whole picture."

As variable as the individual perceptions of meaning may be, at least this terrain is a familiar one to art criticism. The question is, are we in fact dealing with social meaning as it is embodied in symbolic acts? "Partofwhatwe're doing is to dream. [An artist] is not changing the homeless problem," said critic and German artist AlfLohr. "How many million homeless are there in the world? How many people is that one artist working with? This is an issue about identity and history." Whether the art operates as a concrete change agent or in the more rarified world of symbolism-and how such symbolism might effect behavior-these questions must inform our critical approach.

Perhaps, in the end, the merit of a particular work in and of itself, judged by whatever criteria, will not be our sole critical concern. If these artists are envisioning a new form of society, along with others working in other manners and places, then their work must be seen with respect to that vision and evaluated in part by its relationship to the collective social proposition to which it subscribes.

In a public art dialog focused on the bureaucratic and the structural, the visionary potential of public art, its ability to generate social meaning, is lost. Inherent in seeing where we are going is asking why we are going there. If we reframe the field within which this artwork operates, re-uniting it with its radical heritage and the artists' ethical intentions, then perhaps it will redirect our understanding of art along a different road. Whether they operate as symbolic gestures or concrete actions, these artists' works must be evaluated in a multifaceted way to account for not only their impact on action but on consciousness; not only their effects on others but on the artists' selves, not only on other artists' practices but on the definition of art itself.

Central to this is a redefinition that may well challenge the nature of art as we know it; art not primarily as a product but as a process of value-finding, as a set of philosophies, as ethical action, and as an aspect of a larger socio-cultural agenda.

Suzanne Lacy is a performance and conceptual artist, writer, and video producer. She is Dean of Fine Arts at California College of Arts and Crafts.

* "Mapping the Terrain: New Genre Public Art" (November 1991) was a symposium at the San Francisco Museum of Modem Art. It was sponsored by the California College of Arts and Crafts and funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, the Gerbode Foundation, the NEA, the Napa Contemporary Arts Foundation, and the Education Department of the San Francisco Museum of Modem Art. "Mapping the Terrain" was also the title of a panel at the College Art Association Conference in February 1992. See PAR vol. 4, no. 2 for details on participants for each of these events.

PUBLIC ART REVIEW FALUWINTER 1993 33

Siah Armajani at Storm King Art Center b y

Robert

Taplin

he centerpiece of Siah Armajani's show at the Storm King Art Center was a new, permanent, outdoor installation, Gazebo for Two Anarchists: Gabriella Antolini and Alberto Antolini. Fabricated in steel with wooden steps and floors, the structure consists of two small , identical rooms and an open truss work bridge that reaches from one room to another over a shallow trench filled with flowers. In each room stands a single, large, built-in chair facing its mate through the connecting hallway created by the bridge.

The rooms are bui I t of open latticework walls and densely cross-braced comer posts. These steel comer posts and the bridge are, of course, strongly reminiscent of American railroads, an earlier cu ltural icon of progress, power,

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and freedom. The remaining elements-the stairs, railings, and chairs, as well as the diminutive architectural scale of the whole piece-invoke the gazebo of the title. Thus, the piece evokes associations with two familiar aspects of the American built environment, the railroad and the village green, and seems to evoke an era of interconnectedness and social cohesiveness now di stant or lost.

The gazebos are painted dark green, the bridge is painted white. Both the rooms and the bridge have di scretely tilting roofs that cause the piece to "look out" slightly more in one direction than the other. The piece is beautifully sitec!l on a small flat-topped hill in the middle of Storm King's expansive lawns.

One enters the piece by climbing a short staircase that leads up a doorway in the side of one gazebo. After crossing the bridge, the

34 PUBLIC ART REVIEW FALUWINTER 1993

viewer can leave through an identical doorway on the opposite side of the opposite room. Sitting in one of the gazebos brings on a strangely mixed sensation of ease and discomfort. To your right is a large, open window frame worked into one of the already airy walls. It has a generous shelf on which one might set one's book, (Trotsky's History ofthe Russian Revolution perhaps) or a drink.

The window frames an idyllic view of rolling hills and woods. The hard, straight-backed seat feel s more like an electric chair than a lawn chair. The seat at the other end of the covered bridge could be occupied by your interrogator, your fellow victim, or by another citizen merely trying to get out of the sun .

The ambiguities in this bi-polar arrangement, in concert with the piece' s title, en-

courage the viewer to see the sculpture as a mctaphorfor the strengths and weaknesses of public debate in an open, democratic society.

Despite the endearing connotations of trans ition and access that cling to the bridge as metaphor, the physical and mental distance between the two chairs speaks of strain. This fact can be read as a call for "distance"-i.e., objectivity and rationality. Alternately, the arrangement can seem aggressively rigid and impersonal. The more pessimistic view of the possibilities along this continuum are encapsulated by two birdcagelike structures that project from the back of both rooms, directly behind the chairs. Made from closely arrayed, light vertical rods, these cages are open to the air but inaccessible to the hand of the viewer. Clearly alluding to imprisonment, they also seem to invoke a traditional simile-that between flight and thought. In short, they can be seen as symbols for society's attempt to crush the two anarchists' imagination and idealism. Like the bridge, the cages are painted white.

While the alternately lyrical and discomforting tone of this piece is quite effective, Armajani's didactic and symbolic ambitions seem frustrated by his longstanding preference for playhouse scaling. Elements like the trusswork bridge have been reduced substantially from life size, which gives them a pictorial or representational status. Because Armajani insists on maintaining actual physical access to the piece, he cannot reduce elements to miniature scale or articulate them in anything other than a sturdily functional manner. The piece is therefore left suspended between the truly engulfing spatial experience of architecture, on the one hand, and the fantastic theater of imagination to be found in

miniature, on the other. The amusement park associations with this "bigger than a toy but smaller than a house" sense of scale seem anti thetical to the artist's ai ms and reduce the piece's overall effect to that of an imposing architectural "folly."

Armajani seems to be responding implicitly to some of these problems in other work on display at Storm King. All the remaining sculptures and drawings, with the exception of two more outdoor park-bench-like pieces, are part of a large ongoing series simply titled "Streets." In these works, Armajani deploys some of the same railroad and lawn furniture imagery as is found in Gazebo, but in a far more playful and evocative fashion. With their many radical scale shifts, these pieces are clearly depictive, not interactive, works.

As viewers, we enter them with our eyes, not our feet.

Streets #49 consists of several railroad bridges fabricated in a variety of conflicting scales. They are held aloft by more simple trusswork than that in Gazebo. A species of stylized dothesl ine hung with copper clothespins and "sheets" of brass screening runs through the largest bridge like a set of stiff flags.

Underneath are more elements in a variety of scales from life-size (a set of folding chairs and a table) to miniature (a glass vitrine full of model buildings for toy trains). One toy building has been enlarged to roughly the size of the table. Everything, with the exception of the toy buildings in the vitrine, has been fabricated in metal; some elements are stained deep candy colors. This piece, like the other large sculpture in the show (Streets #60) exists in a world of childhood fantasy blown up to dreamlike proportions. At the

same time, the workmanlike construction of the various elements gives all the objects a seriousness and off-kilter elegance. Whereas the element of playfulness in Gazebo seems at cross purposes to its o,¡'!rall aims, in the "Streets" series Armajani is forthright about his involvement with toys and a form of poetic make-believe. The viewer is asked to move around the sculpture while swelling and shrinking body size in order to imaginatively explore Americana as interpreted first

by Lionel or HO, then by Arrnajani' s fabricators. It is as if Alice were a boy and Wonderland were the hobby shop, with a cookie labeled "Eat Me" on every shelf. The indoor work, while perhaps less ambitious, feels more of a piece and ultimately more authentic.

In a show held simultaneously at Max Protetch, Armajani exhibited the models for both Streets #49 and Streets #60 and many others. The models were made almost entirely of toy train and doll house paraphernalia roughly joined together. The improvisational nature of the artist' s three-dimensional collage was immediately apparent. In the enlarged works, the formal aspects of the artist's method tend to dominate the poetic.

Nevertheless, I find the conflict between fantasy and formality in these works more satisfying than similar conflicts in the outdoor work. While I admire Armajani' s ambition to create public places that are both open and contemplative, comfortable and discomfiting, I have an unwelcome and contradictory feeling that I am being told to go out to the playhouse and study my history.

Robert Taplin is sculptor and free-lance critic.

REVIEW

Summer Harvesl allhlm Hirsch Farm Yearly Conference: July 5-12, 1993 b y

Rob i n

Edgerton

he words public and art are red herrings on the trail of describing the Hirsch Farm Project, now in its third year. The summer conference hosted by the Hirsch Foundation stakes its working existence on the fragi lity of ideas, the problems of personality, and the impossibility of communication.

Instead of public art projects (or paths towards installations or artparks and the like) in a rural setting, the project retains some obscure "public service" features and keeps art in the picture solely through discussion. Except for its small-scale and semi-scientific conservation projects, the Hirsch Farm exists as an intensely private, concentrated oneweek-long think tank. After witnessing the conference in action, I had two thoughts: the old "if a tree falls in a forest. .. " question (replace "forest" with "middle-of-Wisconsin") and Alfred Hitchcock's movie, Lifeboat-a set of strangers thrown together (albeit not in danger).

A small group of professionals (less than 10) from different fields, mostly in the arts and the academy, are brought together on the Hirsch Farm in Hillsboro, Wisconsin, assigned a topic, and asked to discuss the topic that doesn't exist yet except in the mind of curator Mitchell Kane. Previous topics have been "Mud: Or How Can Social and Local Histories be Used as Methods of Conservation?" and "Pressure on the Public: Re-examining the Role, Definition, and Myths of the Term 'Public'." This year's topic was "Non spectacle and the Limitations of Popular Opinion." The farm/rural setting used to be more integral to the project. Now, because the participants in the project are mostly from urban settings, they tend to view the rural landscape and farm community as an "other," separate lifestyle. So the countryside remains a neutral environment, a not-actually-blank blank slate, as it were. But the lovely farm nonetheless has its effects on the participants. Mosquitoes, thunderstorms, and stargazing can be transforming on their own, academic discussion notwithstanding. I'd be interested, however, in seeing how a group of people comfortable and knowledgeable in the rural setting but versed in theory would resolve problems or issues within the project' s scope.

The basic framework for the conference: participants are selected from disparate fields but " linked" to the discussion topic through their past or recent work, giving the discussions a range of perspectives, as well as an interdisciplinary mix that seldom exists in the outside world. The objective of the Foundation is for the discussion generated over the six days to filter through the participants' minds and be fixed in the pages of a catalog for outsiders, mostly professionals in the arts.

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The catalog's responsibility is to interpret or convey thi s set of private discussions to a larger, though admittedly very specific and savvy, pulblic. In my opinion, however, the process is much more important and interesting than ~he comparatively dry, dense, and cryptically bland resu lts the cataloguing process has interpreted in the past. The catalog is also supposed to serve as the respo nse of the participants to the Project and to the topic itself. Bul: as this express ion, the catalog turns a li vely group, full of interaction and reaction, into a solitary communication problem for each participant. This is especially significant because the group dynamics of 12-hour days among strangers, especially highly educated, opinionated strangers, nearly usurp but definitely complement the conference's intended focus. Participants simultaneously present their work and get to know each other's personal ities. The presentation of work becomes linked to how the individual's personality produces the work as well. This presentation, or critique, includes an an alysis of a person's motivations for doing the work, and what their work reveals about themselves.

Curator and artist Kane's presence is inseparable from the project at the moment.

Al though he assumes an observer's or facilitator's role, the conference portion of the project mimics his artworks-mostly installations that consist of odd combinations of materials and assemblages of evocative, though nolt particularly obvious images and histories in obscure, pointed juxtaposition.

He works the same way for the Hirsch Foundation witl1 people as his materials. In selecting individuals for a topic in which their

particular placement, role, or even reason fo r being there is not immediately apparent, he's playing with factors he cannot control as he can in hi s artwork. The most negative res ult is a certain resentment; the group can be irritated by hi s obscuri ty of vision, reacting with a "why me, what am I doing here, and do I give a damn?" attitude. On the other hand, this ambiguity works to Kane's advantage when the participants strain to find their connections to each other and to the topic at hand.

Founder and observer Howard Hirsch envisioned this project in a unique way. Instead of choosing ordinary pathways for funding the arts privately, like presenting, granting, or buying art objects, Hirsch desired a patronage of ideas. It's based somewhat naively on the notion that the revolutionary thoughts and ideas of each century are built upon a fertile breeding period at the end of the previous century-basicall y the fin-de-siecle concept. It requires a leap of faith to believe that the discussion and interaction taking place during one week in Wisconsin will eventually affect larger communities in some similarl y epochal way. If the Hirsch Farm Project has an effect, I would arg ue it wi ll be through the Project's impact on the participants rather than through the catalog they produce.

This year's participants included public artist Dennis Adams, art historian and editor Helen Molesworth, public art historian Anna Novakov, artist Sarah Seager, graphic designer Rick Valicenti, lawyer Jane Whicher, and artist Pae White. The catalog for "Nonspectacle and the Limitations of Popular Opinion" will be published at the end of the year through the Hirsch Foundation , 3375 Commercial Ave. , Northbrook, IL 60062.

Robin Edgerton lives and writes in Minneapolis.

Barn presentation/discussion space, Hirsch Farm. (photo: courtesy Hirsch Farm)

36 PUBLIC ART REVIEW FALUWINTER 1993

BOOK REVIEW

"Art in Public" R e vi e w e d b y j e ffr ey K a st ner espi te its admi rabl y practical ambitions, A rt in Public: What, Why and How (S underland, England : AN Publications, 1993) is perhaps most interesting because it illustrates a central conceptual difficulty in contemporary public art -the conflict between the solicitude that leads to "how-to" guides fo r public art, and the fac t that these need to be created at all.

It's not that A rt in Public's useful , if rather deadpan, selecti on of critical background, poli tical disc uss ion, and practical advice fo r both the wo ul d- be and practi sing public arti st opens any conceptual can of wo rms. It' s des igned as an aid in understanding the basic issues at pl ay in contemporary publi c art and as a dictionary of pragmatic suggesti ons fo r those who wish to undertake projects. It succeeds at these goals. But because the authors rightl y recogni ze the connections between publi c art, the public artist, and the bi g headac he machine of public art bureaucracy, they also raise questions vital to the identity of contemporary art projects for public spaces.

With its 160-odd pages broken up into 13 sections and over 80 sub-headings, A rt in Public does at times seem to err on the side of di versity, attempting to cover so much ground that it fee ls a bit like an outline fo r a text yet to be written instead of a fini shed project. As a guide fo r the practitioner-a "handbook" thi s format is undoubtedl y appropri ate, but it

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makes the book feel less like something to be read than something to be ski mmed once and thereafter consulted onl y occasionally.

Its initi al sections, dealing in broad terms with the fi scal and conceptual issues underpinning pub lic artwork, are the most engaging. Sara Selwood's chapter lay ing out the bureaucratiic structure of public art projects is heavil y weighted toward the British situation, foc using on the work of the Arts CounciI (the UK's version of the National Endowment fo r the Arts) and, to a lesser degree, regional and local bodies and corporate sources, which help to develop, fund, and administer projects fo r public settings. Infrequentl y op inionated, Selwood presents her materi al in a matter-of-fact journalistic fashion- indeed, when a critical stance is taken , it is most likely to come in a quotati on from someone quoted (thi s is the case throughout the book) rather than fro m the author herself.

While thi s strategy fits well with the book' s mi ssion of being a compendium on contemporary discourse within the fi eld, readers may sometimes find themselves wishing for more criti cal input fro m the contributors to guide them through the laundry list of views in the essays.

James Peto's section, "Roles and Functi ons," is probably the most effecti ve and interesting . Taking on a broad appraisal of philosophical approaches to the development of proj ects., Peto has the best material to wo rk with of all the book's contributors. With a readable style and a broad base of wellchose n exa mples- fo r example Mierl e Ukeles, Esther and Jochen Gerz, Jenn y Holzer, Scott Burton, And y Goldsworthy, and Krzystof Wodiczko-Peto sets out a selecti on of conceptually di vergent approaches embracing political comment, enviro nmental intervention, and social pro-action, and develops a conceptual schematic against which a wide range of publi c projects can be di scussed.

The remainder of the book is a handbook for the public artist. Well -organi zed and comprehensive, the sections are devoted to the numerous survival skills required by those venturing into the bureaucratic wilderness of the public art process . Presenting a wellrounded vision of the practical side of art for public sites, the contributors cover everything from the experiences of practising public arti sts and the nuts and bolts of project presentations (the proposal, visual material, the portfo lio, rejecti on/success) to the process of developing the commi ssioned work (ti me-scales, negotiation, consultation with the community,

and publi c ity strateg ies fo r the wo rk's " launch"). In what is probabl y its most useful element, the book concludes with a set of indepth listings (agai n very heavil y weighted to Britain) of commissioning organizations, info rmation services, arti st groups, and publications fo r those interested in public art as practitioner or administrator.

Ultimately there's little to fa ult in Art in Public: What, Why and How. The quality of the writing and edi ti ng is sometimes uneven, and the low-budget design leaves the book's small pages cluttered with text, capti ons, pull quotes, citations, and small , grayish, difficult-to-read images, but for the most part the book acco mpli shes what it sets out to. Certainly there's no question that its intentions are noble. Yet the whole time I was reading it I couldn ' t shake the feeling that, however admirable the notion of educating artists in the vagaries of the public art bureaucracy, the real problems with the fo rm have less to do with practi tioners than with inherent fl aws in the institutional processes arti sts must negoti ate to bring their work into being.

The more I see of public art, the less I li ke it. M y once indiscriminate enthusias m has increasingly been tempered by its relati vely minor achievements. It' s not so much that works fai l as objects or schemes, but that fo r one reason or another, they fre quently fail to li ve up to their potential. The collaboration and compromi se, social and intellectual, that are necessary in public art can be both signposts and stumbling blocks to successful projects. Helping artists develop greater understanding of the complexiti es of bureaucratic processes may be a step in the right direction, but I fear the quality of projects for public space is destined to remain uneven until the bureaucracy undergoes a simil ar reeducation, until its processes begin to display a greater understanding of art's complexities.

Jeffrey Kastner is a writer li ving in London and fo rmer editor of Public Art Review.

Art in Public: What, Why and How is avail able fo r £9.95 (plus overseas postage) fro m AN Publications, FREEPOST, P.O. Box 23, Sunderland SRI lBR, UK.

IS 333·2558 • V£tlU£ !tIltltI£~POl 4\3 C£O~R ~

Coming in Issue 10: Spring/Surnnler 1994

HERE & GONE: Temporary Public A,rt PUB LIC ART REVIEW FA LUWINTER 1993 37

BOOK REVIEW

"Culture and Democracy" Reviewed by Patrice Clark Koelsch any of the pieces in Culture and Democracy: Social and Ethical Issues in Public Support for the Arts and Humanllies (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1992), were originally prepared for a 1990 conference at the University of North Florida's Center forthe Humanities and were written in the heat of congressional and special-interest brush fires sparked by the revelation that NEA dollars supported-directly or indirectly- artists and exhibitions whose subject matter was controversial. Many of the essays go over now-familiar territory : the exhibition of Andreas Serrano ' s Piss Christ; the decision of the Corcoran Museum to cancel Robert Mapplethorpe' s retrospective exhibition, "The Perfect Moment"; the arrest, for "pandering," of Dennis Barrie, the director of the Cincinnati Museum, which subsequently mounted the Mapplethorpe show; the denial of grants to four performance artists who had been enthusiastically recommended by the peer panel; and the offagain, on-again funding of an exhibition that focused on AIDS at Artists Space (New York).

Given these circumstances, it is not surprising that much of the discussion in Culture and Democracy concentrates on the NEA as the mechanism for public support of the arts.

(There is very little consideration of the humanities and the issues specific to scholarly support, but there are intimations that the NEH is the more responsible of the two "sister" endowments.) In "The Public Interest in Public Culture," Kevin V. Mulcahy suggests that the NEA be reorganized by goal as opposed to arts discipline. He believes that a function ally-based arts endowment that

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provides support for arts institutions, individual artists, arts development, and arts education would be more likely to use "artistic excellence that is broadly accessible" as a grantmaking principle than the current discipline-based, peer-review system. These ideas deserve serious consideration and more thorough explication.

Several contributors, among them John K. Urice, Samuel Lipman, and William D. Grampp, argue that the NEA is a deterrent to artistic excellence and question whether any sort of direct government support is appropriate in a free-market economy. Urice's "Reflections on Public Arts Support" is a confession-and-conversion story about Urice's career as an administrator for a state arts agency. He maintains that his job with the arts agency was analogous to a previous job as a social service case-worker, including agency-wide lack of professionalism, disdain for clients, and marginal expectations of qualitative change as a result of services rendered . Urice concludes that the NEA (and its state affiliates) has substituted access for excellence and that the general state of culture is worse rather than better as a result of federal largesse. This lament-in the prelapasarian days before public subsidy and cultural pluralism the U.S. once had worldclass playwrights, orchestras, and painters, but now culture is going to hell in a handbasket-is a corollary of nostalgia for a mythical golden age of meritocracy when unfettered genius-artistic, financial , or political-rose as naturally as cream.

On the: other side of the argument, Hans Haacke, Adrian Piper, and Joy Sperling defend the importance of public support for art thatchaUenges the status quo. Piper makes an elegant case that it is important in a democratic society to foster those activities that disrupt social conventions that are in practice unfairly restrictive. Piper makes use of a distinction introduced by Andrew Buchwalter between a public good, which is the aggregate sum of at least most citizens ' individual preferences (e.g., a public library), and a public interest, which is something that serves the ends of public life (e.g., an equitable sales tax). She allows that disruptive art is not a public good, since, by its very nature, it runs contrary to the aggregate of individual preferences. But disruptive art may be in the public in~erest of a democratic society since that socie:ty is founded on the values of tolerance and a respect for diversity of opinions, ideas, and values, which, by its very nature, disruptive art embodies. The helpful distinction between public goods and public interests proviides a more precise tool with which to build a structurally sound public arts policy.

In contrast, Donald Kuspit's rather hermetic soliloquy about the imperative of the ob-scene [sic 1as a dialectically creative reaction against the status quo scene does not advance public policy. Instead, it reveals the insularity of one of the cultural community ' s most prominent members and his apparent disinterest in really speaking to the concerns of people who don't enter the white-walled inner sanctum.

38 PUBLIC ART REVIEW FALUWINTER 1993

Culture and Democracy includes several essays on culture and cultural policy in Latin America, France, Austria, and Canada. They run the gamut from tantalizingly brief to soporifically detailed, so the reader cannot adequately compare and contrast policies and practices. The inclusion of Harry Hillman Chartrand's whirlwind exegesis of the history of Christianity, "Christianity, Copyright, and Censorship in English-Speaking Culture," is a mystery. Chartrand' s pronouncements (e.g., "The end of sexual apartheid in Christendom began-theologically speaking-in 1950 with the declaration of the papal dogma of the Assumption ofthe Virgin .

This was the 'theologic' confirmation offeminism") are simply bizarre.

Much better judgement prevailed in the decision to reprint Carol Becker' s thoughtful remarks on "The Social Responsibility of Artists," which was written after an art school student exhibited a portrait of the late Harold Washington wearing women' s lingerie, which was confiscated by a group of Chicago aldermen. Becker exarmnes why art school artists so often make ill-informed, naive, andultimately-ineffective work when trying to deal with larger social and political issues.

Becker raises important concerns that are seldom discussed publicly. Her challenge to art educators and institutions advances the case for a more integrated and integral notion of the artist as citizen with related rights and responsibilities.

Although Culture and Democracy fails to deliver a very systematic examination of the social and ethical issues involved in making public arts policy, it offers information and insight in an arena where those are in short supply.

Patrice Clark Koelsch is Executive Director of the St. Paul-based Center for Arts Criticism. She received a McKnight Fellowship to attend an international seminar on "Literature as a Political Force" in Salzburg, Austria this past Summer.

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BOOK REVIEWS

"Public Art Works: The Arizona Models" R evie w e d

by

Gar y

A mdahl

he actions of the Phoeni x Arts Commission, working with (mostl y) cooperating engineers and artists, a willing citizenry, a progressive city government, and a couple of risktaki ng mayors, are as heartening as they are surprising. In their own cheerleaderly prose, they are "a beacon of hope for rejuvenatin g America'scrumbling infrastructure." And while conceding that "Art is no panacea to complex urban infrastructure problems," they insist (rightly)- that " [public art] offers a way to communicate what is important and to demonstrate the mutual dependency among us aiL" Communicate what is important and demonstrate m utuaL dependency : in sofar as the Phoenicians have hi t the nail of publi c art on its head, their rhetoric is laudable; but it is what has actually happened in Phoeni x that deserves national and governmental attention.

PublicA rt Wo rks: The A rizona ModeLs (Phoenix, AZ: Phoenix Arts Commi ssion) looks like a museum or ex hibi tio n catalog: glossy paper, color photographs, interesting graphic design, lots of white space and boldface qu otes . T here are maps, charts, drawings, bulleted steps, and translucent overlays. What there is not is a whole lot of wri ting-w hich, given that it' s a book that should be read by poli ticians and their aides, is probabl y okay. It illustrates, qui te

T

"The Once and Future Park" W R ev i e w e d

by

Gar y

A mdahl

hat a park is, is nearly as vexi ng as the questi on of what art is. If you posit a park as a public space not designated fo r industri al, commercial, or res idential development, and art as a search fo r and approx imati on of unspeakable truth and deepest beauty, you will have begun to struggle with the problem of how art, ecology, and poli tics (read power and money) will come together in parks . This is a prob le m more pressing than it may seem at fir st glance.

The Once and Future Park (Pri nceton, N .J .: Princeton Archi tectural Press, 1993), five brief essays and nine even briefer park design projects in precis, is a good introduction. Developed fro m a symposium held by the Walker Art Center in 1992, the essays clari fy the proble ms to the point of starkness and make the case that solutions are crucial to the we ll-being of the nati on-as important as j obs and health care (other social needs that future parks may pl ay parts in).

One of the firs t principles of working park philosophy is that our public spaces should, or must, refl ect the va lues of our cul ture-pointedl y neither the vision of a single arti st nor the

excitingly, how manhole-cover, hi ghway overpass, and waste-dum p fac ility art can meaningfull y and effecti vely elevate the public spirit of an angry and downtrodden population, at the same time that such wo rk recreates (recreation = park, public works = public space = public art) a sense of wo nde r- if not pride-at how America actually gets through a day.

The challenge, as the PAC saw it, once it had been established and a Percent-for-Art bill had been passed by the city counci l, in a city of 400 squ are miles, a mill ion residents, and a constantl y ex pa nding but fragile infrastructure, was threefold: place artists on design teams; integrate artworks into constructi on projects; and purchase or commi ssion artworks after constructi on.

Clearly, the first two should be the most problemati c, and so they proved to be. The prevailing belief was that if arti sts were viewed as team me mbers rather than as hopelessly inane prima donn as or confidence men likely to foist rusty o ildrums and giant plastic dog turds on an unsuspecting and down-to-earth public, they would "challenge the imagi nation of the bureaucrats, engineers, architects, and landscape architects who, in working for municipal government, too often provide onl y the most standard design solutions."

"As king Around" and "Lookin g Around" were the two fundamental approaches the PAC used in fo rmul ating its Master Plan. Everyone fro m the mayor to the Director of Public Works to museum curators and communi ty acti vists were asked for ideas, support, and money. This inclusiveness was vi tal or rather organi c to the task and informed the projects at every junc-

tu re. When their resources were assembled, the PAC looked in two di recti o ns for clearer visions of what they wanted to happen: the desert and what they call "the public cog nitive map."

Phoeni x is in some ways a ci ty that shoul d not ex ist: the desert forbid it, and its li fe depends on enormously rigorous (not to say expensive and destructive) engineering. Concern fo r ecological soundness and consonance with the beauty and music of the desert were considered paramount (such thin king meets wi th a surprising amount of suspicion and hostility in some design quarters). T he Public Cogni tive Map was based on "city ' s residents' ow n inte rnal maps" and may be one of the hidden keys to understanding publi c art. Such a map works hi stori cally as well as geographicall y, in both time and space, and reveals an often invisible, often imaginary landscape. Outraged res idents may object to a new multilane parkway and overpass, but if real attention is given to their outrage, to hi story, to what people know or fee l in their hearts, such construction may actu all y heal the sense of powerlessness many of us have and allow us to reconsider the coll ision of our hi gh-tech cities and screamin g li ves with the wilderness the Earth reall y is, and the serenity of our secret spirit.

agenda of any single organi zati on, socioeconomic ni che (read race and class) , nor professional speciali zation. As Herbert Muschamp points out in the lead essay, parks, in a society that has speciali zed to the point of dissolution, "can bring together in one site indi viduals fro m the most di verse range of speciali zed disciplines. The design of a park should bear the traces of unrestri cted exchange," thereby becoming "models fo r cross-di sciplinary coll aboration elsewhere . . .experiments in cultural as we ll as env ironmental ecology."

T his ki nd of effort at mutual aid (we again tum to Kropotki n and the anarchists!) is the onl y ki nd that can prevent us from becoming a people whose chief consolati ons are automobiles and a "commerciall y- managed electronic fantasy life, " isolated and paralyzed with fear, "escaping" every second of the long day.

Historian Sam Bass Warner broadens and ampli fies th is theme (to paraphrase, that we are being dri ven mad) with a survey of parks past and present, maki ng the point th at the park as we understand it today (Olmsted's Central Park in New York is the archetype) was the nineteenth century's answer to stresses strikingly similar to our ow n: disease (sanitation had not kept pace with popul ati on in the 1850s) and crime (allowing the introducti on of paid, un iformed po licemen, of which we apparentl y need 100,000 more). As "the strain and discontent produ ced by economic necessities" results in more "extremely narrow and disciplined days," parks, once rethought may aga in prov ide

needed cultural venting.

Patricia Philli ps and Edward Ball discuss vari ous aspects of hyper-pl anned or themed parks. Phillips speaks of "a lethargic public li fe and imperil ed natural environments" in compari ng a park in Zoetermeer, Netherlands, to another in Phoen ix. Ball describes a " vis ion of consumer society characteri zed by convenience, pleni tude, and ubiqui tous technological stunts."

Bo th write rs co nc lud e th a t prog ra mm ed spectacul ari ty will not do, and that the people who will use a park must somehow be consulted.

Diana Balmori , a practical perso n, esc hews apocalyptic alarums in favor of observations li ke these: "Ameri can cities are no longer safe;" with the infusion of private money, "publi c spaces become less public;" and "widespread public support continues to exist for the restorati on of old, large, well-established urban parks and fo r the creation of new ones of a di ffe rent ty pe." Her thin king is sound and her deli very straightfo rward. She wraps thi s primer up tidil y. T he questi on, What are our vaLues? wi ll remai n stuck in your mind, however. If one value on whi ch we prem ise futu re parks is not that we can seek truth and beauty wh ile listening to and helping one another, then the future park is a bleak landscape indeed.

Gary Amdahl's work has appeared in Fiction , and The Quarterly . He is fiction book editor for Th e Hungry Mind Review.

PubLic ArtWorks: The Arizona Mode Ls is ava ilable directl y fro m WESTAF (The Western States Arts Federation). To order, call or write WEST AF, 236 Montezuma Ave. , Santa Fe, NM 8750 1, (505) 988-1 166.

The Once and Future Park is avail able through the Walker Art Center. Address inquiries to Editor, Walker Art Center, Vi neland Pl ace, Minneapolis, MN 55403.

PUBLIC ART REVIEW FALUWINTER 1993 39

WORTHY OF NOTICE A column devoted to exploring what public

art practitioners, administrators, critics, historians, curators, and advocates are looking at, reading, and thinking about. Correspondence is welcome.

by

R e gina

DITTANDER FEVER ROOT ELDERBERRY ELM ELDER EPAZOTE BOARD GUAYUSA GARLIC GINSENG GOLDEN SEAL GOLDEN EBERRY OF HAZELNUT HUAUZONTLE HEDGE-APPLE HONEY LV'~\J'_ HEMLOCK HORNBEAM ECONOMIC HOLLY HEPATICA JABORANDI JACK-IN-THE-PULPIT WARFARE, JACK BEAN "L.'JUL~r..._ .JABOTICABA KINO KENTUCKY COFFEE TREE KRAMERIA KAPOK MAYAPPLE MURUMURU MEXICAN OREGANO MANZANILLA MON ......"vr路路r."'ARY MAMONCILLO MBOCAYA MARLBERRY MAYPOP MILKWEED OF MACAW MULBERRY MANGABA NANCHE ORANGE ORPINE ECONOMIC OLOLIUQUI OAK pi PEJIBAYE PITANGA PAPAYA PLANTS, PLUM INE ROTENONE REDWOOD RYANIA SPECIOSA R SPATLUM SQUASH SWEET POTATO SWEETGUM SATIN LEAF J. SHELL BEAN ~~<.:'v"'~ -"'~ IIM,rwo HOE ~n,n.'.....''' ... '

Fl a nagan

Artists Cultivate New Garden Forms t is mid-August, nearly the end of summer here in the upper M idwes t-a summer of biblicall y torrential rains res ulting in the wo rst grow ing season since the drought of 1988 and the greatest precipitatio n since record-keeping began in the las t century. In spite of the weather, a number of significant public art projects featuring li ving ele ments are underway here and th ro ughout the country, evidence of artists', as well as the publics', growing interest in horticul ture and gardening as express ive forms.

Most of these projects have been sponsored by muni cipalities, private fo undati ons, and arboretums. Few state public art programs have been capable of funding projects requ iring the ex tensive care and mainte nance that li ving elements need. Shrin ki ng maintenance budgets have manda ted that most outdoor public art install ations be " maintenance free ." One exceptio n, undertaken by the program that I manage, was the commi ss ion of a landscape/environmental work entitled "The Ga rden of T ime," created in 1990 by Gary Dwyer and Thomas Oslund fo r the Minnesota Correcti onal Facility at Shakopee. The li ving ele ments of the des ign are tended by wo men inmates enroll ed in the Institu tion's horti culture program.'

Ironically, the garden as an art fo nn may have more pote ntial fo r aes thetic success and public accepta nce than any other contemporary medi um of public art. In his recent book, Passing Strange an.d Wondelfu l-Aesthetics, Nature, an.d Culture, geographer and social phil osopher Yi-Fu Tuan wri tes about how the developme nt of the proxi mate senses of sight, smell , hearing, and to uch are necessary to the cul tivation of an aesthetic life, a life of "shaped" fee ling and sensitive perceptio n. He comments, "The aesthetic impul se, understood as the 'senses come to life,' directs attention to its roots in nature. Though rooted in natu re, (biology), it is di rected and colored by cul ture. Indeed, the ability to appreciate beauty is commonl y understood as a spec iali zed cul tural competence, which varies fro m indi vidual and fro m group to group."2 Although the senses ope n up the world to us, letting us know we are ali ve, most societies consider the di stinction between nature and cul ture importan t. Yi-Fu Tuan states, "In general, wherever the distinction is recognized, the biological, the raw and instincti ve, the unconscious and primordi al are attributed to nature; and fo rm and order, consciousness and deliberatio n, the developed and ac hieved ideal are attributed to culture .. .The level of consc iousness, then, is an indicator of that whi ch distingui shes not onl y between nature and cul ture, but also'between

I

Ron BennE!r, All that has value, for Artists' Gardens, Harbourfront Centre, Toronto, Canada. (photo: Rafael Goldchain)

culture and the aesthetic."3 The garden as an art form is where this distinctio n may be most clearly articulated. If nature arouses our senses, awakening us to what Yi- Fu Tuan defi nes as the "aesthetic impulse,'" then gardens, which are a more inte ntio nal use of nature, have the ability to not onl y elicit an aesthetic impulse, but thro ugh the exercise of the intell ect, to connect us to cultu re . Des igned with complex intentions, the best gardens have hi storically engaged not onl y the senses but also the intellect, becoming profound and enduring cultural artifacts.

Artists have embarked on creati ng both temporary and pennanent gardens as public artworks, perceiving the garden's potential as a conte mporary art form, and aware of its history as unique cultural artifac t.

The A rtist's Gardens, Harboudront Centre, Toronto S ince 1990, Harbourfront Centre, which presents c ultu ral ac ti viti es on T oronto's lakefro nt, has sponsored "The Artist's Garde ns." Artists and landscape architects from across Ontario are in vited to submi t proposals for works that challenge the traditional notion of "garden." Di anne Bos, Vi sual Arts Manager at Harbourfro nt Centre, points out that first and fo remost, the program features gardens des igned by artists, as opposed to gardens w ith sculptu res in them. Throughout the fo ur路路year hi story of the program , the

40 PUBLIC ART REV IEW FALUWINTER J993

gardens have included critical re-presentations of the primordi al lakes hore of Lake Ontario; the verge area of superhighways; a simulation of the type of overgrown urban backyard that often punctuates the tid y grid of the city. Garden artists have addressed issues of vandalism against objects of beauty and culture, as well as the economic value of plants.They have also re-interpreted the traditi onal knot and spiral fo rms of orthodox gardens.

Thi s year's crop, covering 10 acres, and o n displ ay fro m June through September, includes seven new and fo ur ongoing gardens.

Three garde ns, which continue fro m prev ious years, presumably because of their visual interest and popularity, share simil arco nceptual strategies .

The Domestic Wilderness Garden (1990) is a coll aboration between artist Cecily M oon and landscape architect Kate All an . Thi s garden contrasts a replica of the ori ginal fo rest of southern Ontario, based o n some of the descripti ons taken fro m Susanna M oodie's Roughing It In the Bush, with a parody of suburban shrubbery pl antings. Whil e Roughing It describes the e nvironment as threatening, M oon's and Allan's garde n reduces the size of the forest to a bird 's eye view, domesticating its threatening elements. The delicate beauty of a grassy field of wi ld fl owers fro m the primordi al landscape is contrasted with the stiffness of a styli zed di spl ay of evergreen shrubs.

Thiccet (1991), by FASTWDRMS collective members Kim Kozzi and Dai Skuse, is named after an Old English word for a dense community of plants. It features a diversity of plants that express, in the artists ' words, "dense contrast and contradictions: culti vated and wild, wet and dry, love and hate, red and green. Qualities epitomized in the thickness of our feeling for the rose bush; from the soft perfume, gentle petals and the poetry of bright flowers, to the tangled thought of dark brambles, and the cruelty of thorns."

Karyn Morris' Whimsical Shore (1992) recreates the landscape that once bordered Lake Ontario. Two plant beds lie horizontal to the lake's shoreline and feature a sandy beachfront lined with ornamental grass and sumac trees fancifully interpreting plants that might be found by a lakeshore.

The concepts for these gardens spring from either an implied or explicit literary source, whether the poetry of the word "thiccet" and its associations, a description of the landscape that once bordered Lake Ontario, or descriptions of the original forests of southern Ontario. These gardens build their visual richness on aesthetic and historical associations that appear to have resonance for Ontarians.

The local critical responses, however, show confusion about how to think about gardens whose intention is to recognize or comment upon humankind 's manipulation of nature and the garden form itself. In 1992, H. Fred Dale, the gardening writer for the Toronto Star, indicated that The Domestic Wilderness was his favorite work because "while many others were more art than gardening, you could replicate this in your backyard, and find it attractive all year." Architecture writer Christopher Hume, also with the Toronto Star, found the 1992 gardens thoughtful and full of good intentions, but as gardens, he found them curiously lacking in appeal. "What we get here is a sense of gardens about gardens: Plants and flowers are no longer considered for their esthetic or practical qualities, but for their political connotations."

Ron Benner's 1993 garden continues the tradition of political comment. All That Has Value examines the importance of systems of classification that shape our knowledge and valuation of plants. The garden contains trees, flowers, and vegetables that are native to the Americas and have specific economic value.

Benner shows us vegetables that have gained notoriety in European countries but have originated in the Americas, for example, the "Irish" potato that comes from Peru.

While the four gardens described above take the subject of "garden" and examine its contemporary social and economic meanings and its relationship to landscape, the artists have also capitalized successfully on the garden's traditional aesthetic form. They have created gardens that are visually satisfying as well as instructive.

Several of Harbourfront's gardens have attempted to use the garden form to create a new object without adequately acknowledging the garden's intrinsic values (its "subject"); these are consequently less satisfying.

It's as iftlhe artists have created works with a new tool they have not entirely mastered.

Simple pllants may be weighed down by too much conceptual baggage. One particularly heavy-handed example is a 1993 work composed of a wood therapy couch and a wood therapist's chair occupied by a tree, both encircled by native aspens. The ensemble is meant to represent "the cathartic and emotionally uplifting effect that trees have on us."

Harbourfront Centre plans to continue the popular "Artist's Gardens" series with the ongoing support of Sheridan Nurseries, which donates all of the plant stock. Larry Sherk, a master horticulturalist who has worked with artists since the inception of the project, enjoys worlking with them because "they are making horticulturally interesting use of the plants. I don't want the gardens looking like parks department flowerbeds." Harbourfront Centre's own grounds crew maintains the gardens.

Two other noteworthy gardens that will be permanent additions to the urban landscape are undelr construction in Saint Paul, MN, and Alexandria, V A.

between sculpture and poetry, the poets' texts and their experience of the site were the impetus for the design-each poet saw something different in the landscape."

The design involves a series of six interlocking granite rectangles on the ground plane, suggesting the joining of hands and the linking of individual voices. Each of the six spaces belongs to an individual poet and is identified by internal shapes and sculptures that support the poet's text, etched into granite. Each poet's work is further represented by poetry and patterning in the iron railing surrounding the site. Cultural symbols from the texts are alluded to through various structures in the garden. For the viewer, the spatial/sculptural experience becomes part of the "reading of the space." The garden will be completed in fall 1993 .

King Street Gardens Park, Alexandria, VA Seattle artists and des igners Bu ste r Simpson, Laura Sindell, Mark Spitzer, and Becca Hanson have collaborated on the King Street Gardens Park for the City of Alexandria, Virginia. The project has been conceived and managed by the King Street Task Force, a coalition of developers, neighborhood activists, arts supporters and city boost-

Commemorative Poetry Garden, Saint Paul, MN Artist Cliff Garten, in collaboration with poets Roberta Hill-Whiteman, Soyini Guyton, Sandra Benitez, David Mura, Xeng Sue Yang , and John Minczeski, has designed a "Commemorative Garden" to be located on at bluff overlooking theMississippi River in downtown Saint Paul.

The project has been funded by the Saint Paul Foundation and developed in cooperation with the City of Saint Paul and Ramsey County.

The intention of the project is to create a public place- a gardenthat celebrates cultural differences and asks us to consider our own personal histories in the context of a many-valued communiity. Garten comments, "A memorial should give us back information about ourselves and make us ask questions about what we are memorializing. Just as there iis no single author of history, there is no single author of this memorial. As an artist, I Cliff Garten, Commemorative Garden, (detail, under construction), Kellogg Mall have been fascinated by Park, 51. Paul, MN, 1993 (photo: Chris Faust) the relationship between text and image. While the poetry garden is a dialog PUBLIC ART REVIEW FALUWINTER 1993 41

Buster Simpson, Laura Sindell, Mark Spitzer, Becca Hanson, King Street Gardens, (preliminary drawing), 1991 . (drawing: courtesy Mark Spitzer)

ers, and partially funded by the National Endowment for the Arts and the Virginia Commission on the Arts. King Street Gardens Park will be constructed by private developers on land that is owned by the city.

According to architect Mark Spitzer, the design had three goals: first to re-establish some portion of the wetlands which had been lost; then to provide opportunities for socialization genu ine enough that the space will draw people to it; and fina ll y, to express the values and hi story of the ongoing development project.

The team's design includes a marsh, seen both as a museum piece that recalls the site's past ecology and as a collection basin for water. A grid of trellises combining formal .. and informal geometries and relating to the ' surrounding street grid provides a framework for flowering vines. Borrowing the sculptural qualities of George Washington's three-cornered hat for the three-cornered site, the design features a topiary form that pays homage to the nation's first president, who first surveyed and platted Alexandria. The topiary three-cornered hat wi ll provide a welcoming gateway to the site. King Street Gardens wi ll be constructed in two phases and completed by summer 1994.

While gardens may first elicit an aesthetic impul se because they appeal to our senses of sight and smell, the design of these artists' gardens also exhibit form and order, consciousness and deliberation. They have additional intentions. While the Harbourfront Centre gardens take the historical, social, and economic meanings of garden and landscape as their subject, the Saint Paul and Alexandria gardens intend to produce a new type of civic space. All these works attempt to create garden form s that not on ly balance the expectations of the senses and the requirements of the intellect but also acknow ledge the complexity and contradictions of a contemporary, post modern society still dreaming of the garden of Eden.

Suggested from Our Readers: Duluth, Minnesota sculptor Ben Effinger• Hiroaki Yamashita, Ancient Grace-Inside the Cedar Sanctuary of Yakushima Island.

(Location, ST: Cadence Books, 1992). A picture book of the otherworldly sculptural forms of nature in a cedar sanctuary on a Japanese island that receives over 700 inches of rainfaIl per year.

Public Art Review managing editor Bruce Wright-• June, 1992 issue of Environnemental magazine publlished in Brussels, Belgium, foc uses upon "Le Notre ... et puis?" Written mostly in French, with some English, this special issue examines the legacy of Le Notre (who designed Versailles) to European landscape architecture as the year 2000 approaches. Le Notre, who worked with the architect Le Vau, decorative artist Lebrun, and numerous sculptors and frescoe artists, integrated all the arts in his designs for public spaces.

Public Art Review project manager Jack Becker-• Mark Francis and Randolph T. Hester, Jr. , eds., The Meaning of Gardens (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990). A wide-ranging selection of essays under chapter headings including " Faith," "Power," "Ordering," "Cultural Expression," "Personal Expression," and "Healing."

Saint Paul artist Cliff Garten• Two essays from Landscape lournal are highly recommended. Patrick M. Condon, "Radicall Romanticism," v. 10, no. I (S pring 199 1), poses a dialectic between nature and culture that turns the notion of "garden" inside out. James Comer, "A Di scourse on Theory II: Three Tyrannies of Contemporary Theory and the Alternative of Hermeneutics," v. 10, no. 2 (Fall 1991 ), examines the crisis of meaning in contemporary culture and possibilities for "regaining ground" through endeavors in the landscape.

And my most interesting recent reads-

42 PUBLIC ART REVIEW FALUWINTER 1993

• Myra Mayman and Cathleen McCormick, Five Views: One Landscape. (Cambridge, MA: Office for the. Arts at Harvard and Radcliffe, 1992). Critical case studies offive projects undertaken on the Radcliffe Quadrangle by landscape architects Michael Van Valkenburgh and Martha Schwartz, and artists Ross Miller, Bert Snow, and Marty Cain.

• Michael Poll an, Second Nature - A Gardener's Education (New York, NY: Dell PublishinglLaurel Paperback, 1991). Topical essays grouped by season. In particular, see Chapter 10, "The Idea of a Garden," pp.

209-38.

• Richard Westrnancott, African-American Gardens and Yards in the Rural South (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1992).

Fascinating ethnographic study of garderung traditions that explores the thoughts and impulses behind each design, focus ing on the concept of the garden as a place serving specific functional needs and also expressing val ues, aesthetic preferences, and spiritual beliefs.

Regina Flanagan is a photographer and program associate for the Minnesota Percent for Art in Public Places program. She is also an inveterate gardener.

Notes: 1. For a critical review of the landscape/environmental work at Shakopee Correctional Institution, see "The Garden of Time-A Mystical Garden in the Shadow of a Women's Prison," by Kate Christianson.

Inland Architect, (September/October, 1992), pp. 446.

2. Yi Fu Tuan, Passing Strange and WonderfulAesthetics, Na ture. and Culture (Washington. D.C'!

Covelo, CA: Island Press/Shearwater Books, 1993), pp.7-8.

3. Tuan, p. 8.

PUBLIC ARTICLES

Conserving Public Collections A column devoted to post installation care and maintenance ofpublic art, and reporting developing trends in program administration.

bY

Robert

Schultz

n the United States today, public art programs are administered by more than 200 agencies and have established a firm foothold in the ci vic arena. Understandably, much emphasis is placed on the front end of the process to assure that quality projects are conceived, designed, and installed. But arts ad ministrators cannot be content just to rack up more installations. In fact, history may evaluate the overall success of publiclyfunded art based on our cultural stewardship and our willingness to create adequate, longterm policies for managing collections.

Collections management is not effective when only crisis-avoidance is considered.

Because regular conservation of artwork costs far less than infrequent restoration, and design and installation fees represent a fraction of long-term maintenance budgets, responsible public art agencies must plan, design, and oversee comprehensive, pro-active collections management programs.

With the maturity of public art have come broader efforts to move into design collaborations. As design teams begin to reshape urban spaces and focus public attention on the aesthetic possibilities for civic infrastructure, the term "artwork" is being continually redefined. Collections have expanded be-

I

yond traditional bronze monuments, stone sculptures, and painted murals.

Today, public art may take the form of holographic imagery, video, public service announcements, sound elements, highway overpasses, power stations, transit centers, environmental works-the potential is limitless. While these media represent diverse challenges for collections managers, certain procedures apply to all successful management policies, whatever the composition of the art collection.

In designing a policy, several key elements must be considered. Begin with a systematic approach to basic record keeping and inventory (preferably computerized), based on standard archival museum practices. Eventually, your agency will be audited and asked to corroborate records.

• To avoid bureaucratic quicksand, assign every project/artwork an identifying number, organize complete photographic documentation, and maintain an accurate, comprehensive paper trail.

• Your documentation system must be flexible, easily updated, and easy to use. Be prepared to provide information in a variety of formats. Make sure the system can absorb additional records and accommodate additional computer memory.

• Have a selection of professional slides and glossy photographs of all projects available for dlistribution (both individually and in sets), along with current individual project information and an overview of the entire collection.

So far, so good. You've got written documentation and slides of all projects in a format that makes sense to you and to an accountant. You have archival slides and photos of the project' s original, pristine condition to help maintain its artistic integrity. You're able to provide good promotional visuals and project fact sheets upon request. Computer files are routinely backed up and a copy is kept off-site.

Now, de ign a process to evaluate the condition of the collection.

• Personally visit all sites regularly-at least quarterly and more frequently for controversial projects.

• Meet with municipal department staff and create a network of "eyes"-people whose jobs regularly take them to art sites.

Make sure they know how to contact you immediately if damage occurs.

• When conservation is required, photograph both the damage and the subsequent treatment. Keep records and receipts of all activities. You'll aid future conservators and provide proof that your agency is serious about preserving the community's investment in public art.

Don 't forget to address the educational component of your agency. Design tours and lead groups to the various project sites.

Whether it means taking a few influential folks around in your car or offering to shepherd out-of-town convention buses, nothing beats hav ing people reach out and touch public art. You can provide commentary, historical perspective, and anecdotes about the artist, project, and process. Work to instill a sense of public ownership in the program and follow up immediately on requests for more information. Build bridges to the community. Promote the process . Advocate.

Of course, each agency's own structure, community demands, ·political climate, and operations budget will directly affect the resources available for collections management. Even when such resources are modest, agencies should commit themselves to designing flexible, comprehensive, and proactive plans for maintaining public art. A commitment to collections management will enhance your community now and provide future generations with the opportunity to enjoy and reflect upon the evolution of American public art.

Robert Schultz is a Phoenix, AZ-based arts management consultant.

Funding Minnesota artists' exploration of the public realm 1993-94 Participants: JoAnne Makela & Galen Brown Kathryn Nobbe Dong II Lee, Joo Yeo No, & Beth Peterson Alexander Tylevich Todd Rhoades, Ali Heshmati & Rick Lundin Elizabeth Crawford Erik Roth Maura Matula Williams Alberto Justiniano Minnesota Artists: Deadline for 1994 proposals: March 1. Call for application forms: (612) 641-1128 To order Public Art Affairs catalogs, send $5 to FORECAST, 2324 University Ave. W., St. Paul, MN 55114. Public Art Affairs is funded in part by Jerome Foundation, the Metropolitan Regional Arts Council, and the James R. Thorpe Foundation.

PUBLIC ART REVIEW FALUWINTER 1993 43

LISTINGS

Updates, Recent Projects, Conferences, Publications, Events, &Opportunities Of Special Interest Olympia Mura ls Removed!

Despite a 1987 ruling that Michael Spafford 's murals may not be removed from the legislati ve chambers of the State of Washington, in Olympia, a vote taken in June by the House authorized $96,000 to have the murals removed. And while the art was intended spec ifica lly for the State Capitol, additional funds of more than $ 190,000 were allocated to store the murals and repair the wall s. According to a report in Reflex (Jul y/August, 1993) arti st Michael Spafford, weary of the 12-year controversy, has chosen not to press the issue further.

Robert Morris Earthwork in J eopa rdy King County (W A) Council members Paul Barden and Cynthi a Sulli van are looking at ways to trim the budget and respond to complaints about Robert Morris' untitled earth work, sited between Seatac and Kent (see PA R Spring/Summer, 1993, p. 27). Concern about poss ible destruction of the landmark project, created in 1979, has prompted a study group to prov ide testimony to the council on the earthwork 's importance. A fi nal dec ision on any action to be taken is unlikely before November.

Repeal of New Jersey's Percent-for-Art Legislation Proposed New Jersey 's Public Buildings Arts Inclusion Act, established 1978, may be repealed. Concern over state-w ide spending cuts prompted Assemblyman John Hartmann to introduce New Jersey Assembly Bill 1726 which would repeal the Act. According to the Journal of A rt & El1Iertainmel1l Law (Spring, 1993), the repeal would save the state money, but whether these sav ings are justified depends on whether publ ic art is viewed as an important element for state buildings. At least one survey indicates that it is.

What's not clear at this time is if funds would still be set aside for the completion of projects underway, or for care and maintenance of ex isting works of public art. According to Tom Moran, visual Arts Coordinator fo r the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, " [the Bill) is not moving anywhere."

Florida's % Program Faces 2nd Major Challenge On February 2, 1993, Florida Senator Gary Siegel introduced Florida Senate Bill 108 which seeks to repeal the requi rement that each appropriation for construction of a new state building in Florida include up to $ 100,000 for the acq uisition of art to be placed on public di spl ay in the new building. According to the Journal of A rt & El1Iertainmel1l Law (Spring, 1993), Florida's 1979 art legislation was changed in 199 1 to limit funding from 1/2 of I percentto $ 100,000, and required that the money be spent only on art work to be di splayed inside public buildings. In addition to concern over spending public monies, negati ve response to spec ific works appears to be a factor in the introduction of the bill.

Jane Alexander to head NEA A Senate committee unanimously approved the nomination of actress Jane Alexander to head the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) on September 22. So what does Jane Alexander think of publ ic art? And what are her chances of building a stronger (or at least stable) NEA? It 's unclear at this time how well Alexander, with her celebrity status, will handle the heat from the conservati ve right, and what programs, if any, will suffer. Good luck Jane!

Sculptor Wins Contract Dispute with Bronx Council of the Ar ts New York sculptor Ming Fay has won the fi rst battle

in a war with the Bronx Council on the Art (BCA). In a 199 1exhibition at Hunts Point Food Sculpture Park , sponsored by the BCA, Fay ' s work was destroyed by fire and later discarded without the artist's knowledge or consent. Fay has fi led suit against the BCA to recover the value of his destroyed art work, a series of oversized fruits in wooden crates. In a recent decision, reported in the New York Journal on August 26, 1993, Suprem e Court Justice Alice Schlesinger held that the BCA could not enforce a contract that attempted to insulate it from its own negligence in the care and security of an arti st's work. According to Fay, "Justi ce Schlesinger's ruling on the contract matter is not. only a victory" for him, but also a victory "for all of the New York artists who frequently contribute their works for public display. The precedent-setting value of the decision is that sponsors of such public ex hibits may not be permitted to avoid liability by inserting un fair and unconscionable terms into fo rm ex.hibition contracts." The case is proceeding to trial. (see photo p. 46)

Artpaper Oeases Publication The Board IOf Directors of Visual Arts Information Service, publishers of A rtpaper, have announced that the 12-year-old magazine will cease publication with their October 1993 issue. According to Board President Don McNeil , the organi zation's fi nances "became too pnecarious for the magazine to responsibly continue publishing." As a resource of information and critical w riting,A rtpaper w ill be missed. All of us at PAR wish to thank A rtpaper for their years of service to the Minnesota and national arts community.

Film in the Cities Fades To Black After 23 years of providing media arts programs in the upper Midwest, Film in the Cities announced in August that it will suspend all operations. Suffering fin ancial problems for the past five years, FITC' s defi cit had g~rown to $300,000. FITC received major cuts in funding thi s year by the Minnesota State Arts Board and OIther funders. FITC's major contribution to public art in Minneapolis occurred in 1985 when they presemed an exhibition throughout the city of billboards dlesigned by William Wegman, Barbara Kruger, Cindy Sherman, and other well-known photographers.

President Clinton has declared October National Arts & Humanities Month!

December:1 is World AIDS Day, an international day of action and mourning in response to the AIDS crisis. Many arts organizations observe the day by closing theiJr doors or covering some works of art to symbolize the art which has not been, or will not be created beca.use of artists lost to the disease. Other arts groups have: commissioned or presented new works by artists afJfected by HIV / AIDS .

Obituaries Dale Eldred, internationall y respected public artist, died on July 26, while trying to save artwork threatened by Mi ssissippi floodwaters. According to the Associated Press, Eldred, 59, apparently stepped through an o pening in the second fl oor of the building housing his studio and fell about 20 feet. He died a short time latter at Bethany Medical Center in Kansas City, MO. Eldred had been moving items from the fi rst fl oor tOl the second floor of hi s building, which was threatened by the rising Kansas River. Eldred was well known for his public art projects, including large-scale light interactive constructions, and was one of the best-known faculty members at the Kansas City Art Institute.

Conferlmces & Meetings 1993 Murall Tours of Los Angeles. October 15-17: San Francisco; November 13: Venice and Santa Monica; andl December II : Murals of the 20s, 30s and 40s. Sponsored by the Mural Conservancy of Los Angeles. FOir in formation, call (3 10) 470-8864.

44 PUBLIC ART REVI EW FA LUWINTER 1993

David Culver, untitled, Myrna Loy Center for the Performing Arts, Helena, MT, 1993. (photo: artist) Orange Show Tours."Eyeopeners" tours, Oct. 17: "Houston's East End Tour," and Dec. 7: "Season of Lights Tour." Tours include folk art, parks, murals, and holiday lighting projects. Sponsored by the Orange Show Foundation of Houston. For ticket information call Christy at (71 3) 926-6368.

Books & Publications The Days ofOur Lives, by the artist team of Margaret Crane and Jon Wi net, is a set of wallet-sized cards including graphics, photography, poetic text, and useful information about social agencies in Marin County, California. Inspired by both baseball and votive cards, these hand-held artworks are objects of contemplation as well as vehicles of practical information. Published by Public Art Works as part of their annual "Art-in-Print" program, the project explores new ways for artists to reach a broad and diverse audience. For more in formation, call Margaret Crane at Public Art Works: (4 15) 255-85 05.

Street Gallery: Guide to 1000 Los A ngeles Murals ,

by Robin Dunitz, is the first comprehensive guide book to the interior and exterior painted, tile, and mosaic wall art of Los Angeles County. Published by RJD Enterprises, P.O. Box 64668N, Los Angeles, CA 90064. (470 pp., 175 color plates, 22 detailed maps) Art and Survival: Creative Solutions to Environmental Problems , by Patricia Johanson, demonstrates that art can help heal the earth. For the last 10 years Johanson has been creating large-scale proj ects that posit a radical, yet utterly practical vision. She works with engineers, city planners, scientists and citizens' groups to create her art as functioning infrastructure for modem cities. Her graceful designs fo r sewers, parks, and other functional projects recl aim degraded ecologies, and create conditions that permit endangered species to thrive in the middle of urban centers.

Publ ished by Gallerie Publications as part of their Women Artists' Monograph series, P.O. Box 2901 Panorama Drive, North Vancouver, BC, Canada V7G 2A4 (36 pp., 25 photos and illustrations).

Public Art in Philadelphia , by Penny Balkin Bach, demonstrates the di verse and rich public art history of our nation's first capital. Bach, Executi ve Director of the Fairmount Park Art Association, offers us a unique tour of hundreds of familiar and overlooked treasures in Philadelphia. Published by Temple University Press, Philadelphia, PA 19122. (288 pp., 450 photographs and illustrations, 4 maps).

Public Art Proposals. For a limited time on ly, the International Sculpture Center is offeri ng a presentation of the work of over 90 artists from around the world. Published by NlCAF Internationa l Contemporary Art Fair ( 1992). The cost is $ 15 for ISC members ($20 non-members), plus $3 per book for shipping and handling in the US. To order your copy contact the development office: ISC, 1050 17th St. NW, Suite 250, Washington , DC 20036 (202) 785 0810.

Arts, Visual Arts Program, 1100 Pennsylvania Ave. N.W., Washington, DC 20506; (202) 682-5448.

Recently Completed Projects Tile floor by David Culver. Commissioned by the Myrna Loy Center for the Performi ng Arts, Helena, MT, for the lobby. Slate, 1993. The Center is housed in a 100-year-old jail that was remodeled into the performing arts center. In addition to slate, the floor includes semi-precious stones, ore samples, fossils, crystals, coins and river stones . (see photo)

Stone Stai'rcarpet, by Colin Wilbourn , assisted by

Exhibitions & Events Through October 3 1, 1993. ARTSCAPE: An Outdoor Invitational Exhibition of Works by Regional Artists. The Community Projects Committee of the Eirie Excellence Council presents 12 outdoor installations by regiona l artists. Displayed throughout the city and county, ARTSCAPE includes billboards, sculptures, and instal lations by Richard Denni s, Steven Kemenyffy, Marc ia Dalby, Shelle Lichtenwalter Barron, Susan Kemenyffy , Tom Como, Dan Burke, Joan Damankos, Joe Mannino, Ken Wyten, and Robert Beckman. For details: call (814) 454-7191.

September 13 - November 14, 1993. Botero in New York. The Public Art Fund Inc. has installed its multi si te sculpture exhibition featuring 16 bronzes by Fernando Botero. Sculptures are on view from 54th to 61 st Streets and at Dori s C. Freedman Plaza, 60th Street and Fifth Avenue.

Through November 30, 1993. MetroTech Art Works.

The Publi c Art Fund presents four temporary, sitespecific installations at sites in Brooklyn. Dan Devine's The Secret of Las Meninas , Laura Nash's Condensation Chambers, Stephen Rueckert's ON-aN-ON, and David Schafer's New Century Trellis. For exact locations, contact the Public Art Fund (2 12) 980-4575.

September 30 - January 23, 1994. A New Deal for Public Art: Murals from Federal Work Programs.

The Bronx Museum of the Arts presents a historic exhibition of recently conserved murals commi ssioned during the 1930s and 1940s. Organized in collaboration with the New York City Health and Hospitals Corporation Public Art Program, the exhibit features eight mural projects originally commi ssioned for public buildings in New York City as part of Franklin D. Roosevelt's "New Deal" initiative in response to the Depress ion. Featured artists in include Abram Champanier, Danie l Celentano, Charles Davis (see photo), Stuart Davis, Aaron Douglas, William Palmer, Louis Shanker, and John Von Wicht. Also included are preliminary studies, archival photographs, and other cultural artifacts of the period. Curated by Gladys Pena, Director!Curatorofthe HHC Public Art Program, A New Dealfor Public Art includes a fully illustrated catalogue with essays by noted hi storians Greta Berman, Leslie King-Hammond, Gerald Monroe, and Francis O'Connor. The Bronx Museum of the Arts, 1040 Grand Concourse, Bronx, NY 10456 (212) 681-6000. (see photo p.46) October 12 - 31, 1993: Access Art 1993. Features the work of nationally known deaf artist Chuck Baird, a founding member of Deaf Artists of America. Baird is well known for his untitled mural at Gallaudet University in Washington DC. According to Deborah M. Sonnenstrahl, Chair of the Art Department, "[Baird's] deafness is evident in his art, yet it is presented in a tranquil and benign manner. His art makes us think, analyze, inspect, and examine a deaf individual's approach to life." Over 20 Twin Cities artists with disabilities will participate. Presented at the Waterfall Gallery in the Hennepin County Government Center, Minneapo lis. ACCESS ART 1993 is a collaborative effort ofD.E.A.F., Very Special Arts Minnesota and Community Involvement Programs.

For more information, call Paul Puerzer: (612) 2969748 VrrTY. (see photo)

Karl Fisher. North Dock Sunderland, England. Sandstone, 1992. Part of the SI. Peter's Riverside Sculpture Project, a residency organized by Artists' Agency, a registered charity funded by Northern Arts. (see photo p.46)

Alexa, by Susan Walsh. Kerr-McGee Park, Madison, WI. Cast iron, 1993, Created during her ArtslIndustry residency in 1992 at the Iron Foundry and Enamel Shop of Kohler Company. Assembled of larger-thanlife, brightly colored industrial-looking parts, the sc ulpture wa s de sig ned to recogni ze the neighborhood 's history as an implement manufacturing center.

Shadows of Spirits , by Ta-coumba and Seitu Jones, with poetry by Soyini Guyton. Minneapolis, MN. Cast bronze shadows inset in granite pavers, 1993.

One of several public art projects sponsored by the Nicollet Mall Implementation Board as part of their Mall revitalization effort. Seven shadows honors people from Minneapolis ' past, including Dred Scott, Nellie Stone Johnson, Frank New, Woo Yee Sing, Meridel LeSeur, and An-Pe-Tu-Sa-Pa-Win, a Dakota women whose life and death was the basis of a folk tale about the sound of SI. Anthony Falls. While the names and dates are not included (at the request ofthe Implementation Board), poems are cast into the surface of each shadow, helping to establi sh the identity of each character. According to artist Aiken, "pedestrians can literally step into the shadows of those who helped develop the city." (see photo p.47)

Deep TimelDeep Space: A Subterranean Journey ,

by Leni Sclhwendinger. Denver, CO. Light and sculpture installation, 1993. On December II , New York City artist Leni Schwendinger will unveil her milelong subterranean project sited in a shuttle train tunnel at the new Denver International Airport, the largest public works project in the country today . She is one of 26 artists commissioned to create sitespecific art work through the airport's" I % for Art" program, featuring over $7.5 million-worth of public art (reportedly the single largest public art program in the nation). According to Schwendinger, "Deep Time!

Deep Space fulfills my lifelong dream to design a ' dark ride.' Unlike a theme park, real-life travellers will be invi ted to envision a landscape below the earth's surface alive with human labor and otherworldly drceams." (see photo p.ll)

Opportunities & Competitions African Burial Ground Memorial. Deadline for registration: October 15. Deadline for entries: January 14, 1994. The New York Coalition of Black ArchitectsINational Organization of Minority Architects (NYCOBAlNOMA), in collaboration with the Municipal Art Society of New York and other organizations, is sponsoring a Competition of Ideas to preserve and commemorate New York City's 18thcentury African Burial Ground. The purpose of the competition is to find an appropriate means of memorializing this national and city landmark. Open to architects, urban designers, landscape architects, artists, and the general public. To register, write: NYCOBAlNOMA, Box 5623, Manhattanville Station , New York, NY 10027 .

ARTWORKS m Project. Deadline: October 22.

Commission opportunity through the Oklahoma City Public Property Authority (OCPPA). A total of $40,000 is available interior or exterior work at the renovated Municipal Building, built in 1936 by the Federal Administration of Public Works . For information call: Shirley Blaschke, Project Coordinator: (405) 525-9411 or (405) 239-2788 (evenings).

NationalSculptureSociety's Alex Ettl Grant. Deadline: October 31. $5,000 award available to realist sculptor with outstanding ability and commitment to sculpture. Members of NSS are ine li gible. Submit at least 10 8x lOin. photos. For more info. send SASE to: Ettl Grant, National Sculpture Society, 1177 Ave. of the Americas, 15th FI., New York, NY 100 I 0; (2 12) 764-5645.

ICHTHUS Studios ART PARK. Deadline: November 1. Outdoor environmental artworks in all media are sought for display and sale. Exhibition dates: December to March, or March to June (February I slide deadline) . Send slides or photographs with dimensions and SASE to ICHTHUS Studios, 6787 U.S. 60 East, Josiah Henson Trai l, Owensboro, KY 42303 (502) 264- 1474.

Abington Art Center Sculpture Garden. Deadline: November 1. Proposals are sought for new outdoor works and installations for Spring, 1994. Up to 10 regional and national artists will be selected for commissions, each receiving a $3,000 honorarium . Additional installation support is available. For prospectus, send SASE to Abington Art Center, 515 Meetinghouse Road, Jenkintown , PA 19046; (2 15) 887 -4882.

The American Fertility Society. Deadline: November 1. Outdoor sculpture competition for AFS headquarters. All media considered for this $5,000 sculpture. Entry fee: $ 15. Send up to 10 slides and current resume to AFS Sculpture Competition, Morrix , Boston Architectural Center, 320 Newbury St., Boston, MA 02115 ; (205) 978-5000.

Bush Artist Fellowships. Deadline November 5.

The Bush Foundation awards stipends to artists in amounts up to $26,000 with additional allowances of up to $7,000 for materials, equipment, production costs or travel. For application and information , write: Bush Artists Fellowships, E-900 First National Bank Bldg., 332 Minnesota Street, SI. Paul, MN 5510 I ; (6 12) 227-5222 (eli gibility: MN , ND , SO, WI. No students. Must be 25 or older).

Intermedia ArtslMcKnight Interdisciplinary Fellowships. Deadline: November 10. Five fellowships of $ 12,000 offered to interdisciplinary arti sts. Fellowships may be used for any purpose that advances work and career. Send SASE for guide lines and application. Intermedi a Arts/McKnight Fellowships, 425 Ontario Street S.E., Minneapoli s, MN 55414; (612) 627-4444 (eligibility: lA , KS , MN , NE, NO, SD, WI).

Sue Stu ewer, Dead Injured (Misery and Joy), 8 x 12 mural with 86 images depicting various aspects of head injury, 1992. ACCESS ART 1993 (photo: Craig Dunn, courtesy Very Special Arts MN)

Visual Artists Public Projects. Deadline: October 15 (organizations only) National Endowment for the

PUBLIC ART REVIEW FALUWINTER 1993 45

184 15; (7 17) 224-6300; or Susanne Wibroe, 1077 Lakev ille St., Petaluma, CA 94952; (707) 762-6502; (eligibility: US)

San Jose Veterans ' Memorial Competition. Deadline: November 15. Open to nil media. Winning des igner oversees fabrication and installation. Tentati ve budget is $500-750,000. Wri te or ca ll fo r competiti on kit. Awards: $25,000. Fees: $50 registrati on.

Juri ed. Contact Dav id M. Allen, Project Manager, San Jose Veterans Memori al Des ign Competiti on, City of San Jose, Office of Cultural Affairs, 29 1 Market Street, San Jose, CA 95 11 3; (408) 277-2789. (eli gibility: US and Canada)

The John Michael Kohler Arts Center. No deadline given. Two- and six- month res idencies available in the industrial setting of the Kohler Company to develop install ations, public commi ssions, and sculptural and functional work in vitreous china, cast iron, or enameled cast iron. John Mi chael Kohler Arts Cente r, 608 Ne w York Ave., P.O . Box 4 89, Sheboygan, WI 53082; (4 14) 458-6 144; (eligibility: US)

C ity of Dallas Office of Cultural Affairs. Deadl ine: received by November 14. Dall as is seeking an arti st or team of arti sts to des ign an appropri ate commemorati ve si te-spec ific artwork for Freedman's Cemetery, a Dall as hi storica l landmark that served as a cemetery for freed slaves. Mi nori ties are encouraged to appl y. For more in formation ca ll or write: Public Art Coordinator, Offi ce of Cultural Affairs, 1925 Elm St. Suite 500, Dall as, TX 75201 ; (2 14) 670-3284.

Lila Wallace-Reader 's Digest International Artists Program. Dead line December 1. (for indi vidual arti sts and non-profi t organi zations). Three- to sixmonth res idencies for visual artists at selected sites in Africa, Europe, Latin America, Asia, and the Pac ific.

For applicati on info rmat ion, write: Lil a Wall aceReader's Digest Internati onal Artists, Arts International, In stitute of International Education, 809 U. N. Pl aza, New York, NY 100 17. (eli gibility: US) The City of Los Altos' 5th Outdoor Sculpture Search and Competition. Deadl ine: January 15.

Los Altos, CA in vites artists to loan their work fo r display fo r one-two years. Selected works wi ll be in stalled throughout the city. Contact Bill Iaculla or Cli ff Balch, City of Los Altos Arts Committee, One North San Antonio Rd. Los Altos, CA 94022; (4 15) 948- 149 1.

Public Art Affairs. Deadline: March 1. FORECAST Public Artworks announces the fifth year of fundin g fo r arti sts ex pl oring the publi c realm. Funding and technica l assistance is avai lable in two categories: R&D Stipends (up to $800) for research and development of project ideas; and Public Projects (up to $4,000) for producti on of projects in any di sc ipline.

Restricted to Min nesota arti sts. For further in formation and application forms, contact Jack Becker, project manager, FO RECAST, 2324 Uni versity Av- . enue West, Suite 102, St. Paul , MN 55 1 14; (6 12) 64 1- '.

11 28 .

The Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grants. Deadline: ongo ing. The fo undation support fo r arti sts of merit who work in painting, sculpture, graphics, mi xed med ia, and install ati on. One-year grants of $ 1,00030,000 awarded throughout the year. Write fo r appli cation: T he Pollock- Kras ner Foundati on, Inc., 725 Park Ave. , New York, NY 1002 1; (2 12) 5 17-5400. (eligibility: internati onal).

Open International Design Competition. No deadline given. All media. Competition will foc us on coll aborati ve efforts of archi tects, artists, and land-

Colin Wilbourn, assisted by Karl Fisher, Stone Stairearpet, sandstone, 1992. (photo: Keith Pattison)

Charles Davis, The Railroad Builders, egg tempra on gesso, from Progress of American Industry, 1938. Collection of the New York City Health and Hospitals Corporation. (photo: Tony Velez, courtesy the Bronx Museum of the Arts) scape designers to create a series of publ ic space install ations at several sites in Atl anta. Projects to be completed in ti me for 1996 Olympi cs. Winners will be in vited to negoti ate with the Corporation fo rOlympic Develo pment fo r commi ssions. For in formati on packet: contact ASNCompetition, P.O. Box 1986 1, Atl anta, GA 30325; (404) 723-72 10.

Hirsch Fmrm Project. No deadline given. Artsbased think tank inv ites arti sts, writers, scienti sts, hi storians, and ad mi nistrators to engage in dialog and develop project proposals that bridge public art, environment, and community. Forum stresses development of new ideas rather than production of objects.

The Hirsch Foundation, 3375 Commercial Ave., Northbrook, IL 60062; (708) 480-2000. (see review on p. 36) Freshwater Bay Sculpture Park. No deadline given.

Sculpture studi os available for residencies with the opportunity to create outdoor sculptures and installations. Write for more informati on: Freshwater Bay Sculpture Park, Box 522, Alert Bay, British Columbi a, VON I AO, Canada; (eli gibil ity: international) New Yor~. Mills Art Retreat. No deadline given.

Two- to eight-week residencies provide li ving and studio space plus $200 sti pend in exchange fo r five hours per week of communi ty arts participation. Call or write fo r further in formation. New York Mills Arts Retreat, RR I, Box 2 17, New York Mills, MN 56567; (2 18) 385-3339; (eligibility: international) Healing Through Art. No deadline given. $ 1,000 matching grants avail able for artist residencies in hospitals and hea ling centers. Write or ca ll : Healing Through Arl, P.O. Box 4 11 , Way land, MA 01788; (508) 358-5553; (eligibility: US) Lookout Sculpture Park. No deadline given. Residencies available to arti sts submitting proposals to create outdoor sculpture projects at sites in Cali fornia and Penn sy lvania. Arti sts who work with environmental medi a/issues preferred. Send slides, videos, proposals, letters of interest and SAS E. Lookout Sculpture Parks, Rd . I, Box 102, Damascus, PA

46 PU BLIC ART REVIEW FA LUWINTER 1993

Prison Sentences; Prison as SiteiPrison as Subject.

Planned fo r the spring of 1994 and 1995, this project will address issues of incarceration, architectural interpretation and intervention, and strategies for siteintegrated artwork. The project will provide arti sts from all over the world a rare opportuni ty to work within a sign ificant architecturalfhi storical setting on a large scale with relative freedom. The site, Eastern State Penitentiary , was designed in 182 1 as the fi rst large-scale panopticon prison in the world. It is a landmark architectural expression of survei lIance techniques, concepts of criminality and penitentiary reform . The I I-acre prison has 14 cell blocks radiating from a central rotunda, a church, chapel, work spaces, laundry, and exterior spaces. Vaulted cell s and passage-ways are lit by skylights, and the enti re site is surrounded by a 30-foot high stone wall with medieva l-style turrets and guards' towers at each corner.

Eastern State has been abandoned since 1970 and is in partia l decay. It is presentl y under study for adaptive reuse. Interested persons should send work samples with SASE and a letter of interest to: Juli e Courtney/ Todd Gilens, Prison Sentences, 2227 Bainbridge St., Phil adelphi a, PA 19 146.

Creative Time, Inc. is seeki ng arti sts' proposals for site-spec ific works for its City Wide series. Projects should address current issues; artists are encouraged to be experimental. Past budgets have ranged from $300 to $ 10,000. Professional arti sts only. There is no deadl ine, and new proposals are reviewed every three to fo ur months. For information, send SASE to Creati ve Time, 13 1 West 24th Street, New York, NY 100 11.

The General Service Administration 's (GSA) Arlin -Architecture Program in vites artists to enroll in a Nati onal Artist Slide Reg istry fo r public art commi ssions in federal buildings. Please send current labeled slides and resumes to: GS A, Art- in-Architecture Program, 18 & F Streets, NW , Room 1300, Washington, DC 20036.

Sculpture Source, th e Inte rn ati onal Sculpture Center's computerized visual reg istry and re ferral service, is accepting applications from artists (no deadline). Thi s system refers hundreds of artists annuall y to a wide range of international arts professionals. For information and application: Sculpture Source, ISC, 1050 17th St. NW , Suite 25 0, Washington, DC 20036; (202) 785- 11 44.

Ming Fay, Orange Queen, Black Plum, & Big Bose, prior to installation, and subsequent destruction, at the 1991 Annual Exhibit, Food Center Sculpture Park at Hunts Point, New York. (photo: artist)

National Slide File: T he Nationa l Museum of American Art announces that its newest database, the InvenroryoJAmerican Sculpture, is now open to the public.

The sculpture database contains information such as arti st, title, medium, dimensions, execution date, foundry , provenance, subject, and owner on more than 50,000 American sculptures in public and private co llections all across the country. Both indoor and outdoor works are included. Researchers may call , write, fax, or visit the Inventories in Washington, D.C. to request printouts of sculptures sorted by artist or subject. By late 1993, the Inventories will be available through national and international computer networks such as the Canadian Heritage Information Network, Research Libraries In formation Network, and Internet. For more information, or to request printouts, contact: Inventories of American Painting and Sculpture, Research and Scho lars Center, National Museum of American Art, Smi thsonian Institution, Washington, DC 20560; (202) 357-2941 for painting and (202) 786-2384 for sculpture, or (202) 633-934 1 for fax requests.

Art in the Urban Landscape: No deadline given. A program of Capp Street Project and the Wall ace Alexander Gerbode Foundation. This new program of public art in San Francisco wi ll make grants of $37,500 available to each of six artists from Northern California to create site-specific, semi-permanent art works. The works wi ll be installed in a variety of public sites in San Francisco during the next two years and wi ll be on view for a minimum of three - five years. The aim of the program is to stimulate interest in public art. For information about the program, call :

Linda Blumberg or Amy Hicks at (4 15) 626-7747.

Central Arteryrrunnel Project. No deadline given.

Permanent and temporary public art will be an essential component of the Project as it rebuilds 1-90 and 193 in Boston. The Central Arteryrrunnel Project is the largest public works project in the United States.

At least 20 major permanent works of public art and dozens of temporary works wi ll be incorporated .

Sponsored by the Massachusetts Hi ghway Department and the Federal Highway Administration . To receive a complete package write to: Artery Arts Program Central Arteryrrunnel Project, One South Station, Boston , MA 021 10.

Although Puhlic Art Review makes every effort to verify the information contained in the e listings, arti sts are advised to check deadline and e ligibility requirements before in vesti ng significant time or money.

Organizations or individual s who wish to list items in this section shou ld send information to the ed itor, Public Art Review, 2324 University Ave. W. , St. Paul , MN 55114. Information should arrive by September I and March I respectively for issues published in October and April. We welcome black and white photos.

Philadelphia Office of Arts & CultureIFoundation for Architecture. No deadline given. Entries in all media sought for publ ic art competition to complement creation of city's Avenue of the Arts, 14 blocks of a major thoroughfare. Proposed sites for public art include subway headhouses. Awards: $500,000. Send SASE for prospectus and deadline. Joan MacKi eth, Office of Arts and Culture, 1650 Arch Street, 19th fl oor, Philadelphia, PA 19 103.

Artists I~epresenting Environmental A rts (A.R.E.A.) is developing a data base on informational mate rials and artists who create hands-on installations for the ecology and the preservation o f the environment. For guide lines write to A.R .E.A., 500 East 83 rd St., New York, NY 10028; (2 12) 288-7650.

- Compiled and Edited by Jack Becker

Seitu Jones, Ta·Coumba Aiken, with poetry by Soyini Guyton, Shadows of Spirits, cast bronze inset in gran· ite pavers, Minneapolis, 1993. (photo: artist)

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PUBLIC ART REVIEW FALUWINTER 1993 47

The Permanent Collection: Recent Acquisitions through October 24 Over the past three years. the Walker has added a number of new works to its permanent collection . This exhibition features a selection these newly acquired pieces including paintings

by Willem de Kooning ,and Philip Guston. screen prints by Andy Warhol. multiples by Joseph Beuys. and works by Twin-Cities based artists John Snyder and Dorit Cypis. Galleries A and B.

Selecti~ns on-gomg

from The Living Series

Twenty-eight white granite benches inscribed with text by internationally acclaimed artist Jenny Holzer comprisl~ the newest installation in the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden . The benches are a recent 9lift to the Walker by an anonymous donor. The Garden is a project of Walker Art Center and the Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board.

rt Center

yndale Avenue South . Minneapolis

(612) 375-7622

THE JEROME FOUNDATION SCULPTURE PLAZA COMMISSION PROJECT FOR EMERGING ARTISTS. Commissions of $9,500 (includes artist honorarium) will be awarded to three emerging Minnesota artists to create a public art work for the new Frederick R. Weisman Art Museum's sculpture plaza. The deadline for applications is January 12,1994. For application information write to: