Suwanee sets ambitious vision for public artwork

By Jill Vejnoska


The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

The timing was hardly ideal.

Just two years ago, not long before the world’s economy plunged off a cliff, Suwanee approved an ambitious new ordinance to fund public art. But with new construction everywhere at a standstill, the Gwinnett County city of 16,000 residents couldn’t really test-drive its plan to ask developers to voluntarily commit 1 percent of their total project costs to art installations.

So Suwanee put itself to the test instead. Leaders of the town once best known as home to the Atlanta Falcons’ training camp set aside $78,000 in the budget for its new City Hall to commission a dramatic “suspended sculpture” as its centerpiece. When “Shimmering Echoes” by Seattle artist Koryn Rolstad is formally dedicated Thursday, it will represent the first tangible evidence of the city’s “1 percent for public art” policy in action.

It will also underscore Suwanee’s eager embrace of sidewalk statues, murals and other accessible forms of art at a time of flatlining finances and voter disenchantment around the country. Where many struggling cities see public art as an extravagance these days, Suwanee, on firmer ground financially, sees it as a key to a prosperous future.

While some in town have grumbled about spending on art, supporters point to evidence showing that public art, along with parks, is a key component of economic development. By building a reputation as a walkable, culturally vibrant community, they hope to attract new residents and businesses to a city where both the median family income and home price already are the second highest in Gwinnett, and nearly double those statewide.

On a more philosophical level, they say, public art gets to the heart of what Suwanee is all about.

“One of our goals is to be one of the most connected communities in the U.S.,” said Mayor Dave Williams. “Connected to each other, through things like parks, schools, faith-based institutions and local government. What all of those have as their centerpiece is people coming together and making it a better place. Public art can be an important piece of that.”

Citizen involvement

But will it be? That’s the question facing Suwanee now as it tries to truly put the “public” into public art. The next test will be the “SculpTour,” a quirky idea to dot the downtown area with as many as two dozen statues and sculptures leased from their creators for a year for a nominal fee. The hope is to purchase at least one of the pieces, chosen by a public vote, and to make SculpTour an annual event.

It will cost between $50,000 and $90,000 to mount the first-year event, tentatively scheduled for fall 2010. All that money will have to be raised privately; unlike paying for the city hall sculpture, no city funds will be used.

“The taxpayers have done their part as a whole,” said Dick Goodman, a city councilman who also chairs the Suwanee Public Arts Commission. “I think realistically at this point, it’s up to the citizens and businesses of Suwanee to decide what happens next.”

Enter the Public Arts Commission. Created by the city council nearly two years ago, its seven members, most of them average citizens, are charged with coordinating the developer component of the ordinance and creating programs that bring public art to Suwanee.

At a meeting this month, the group discussed plans for “Arts in the Park,” a juried festival featuring artists at work debuting in Town Center Park opposite City Hall on May 22. And they listened approvingly as one member read aloud from his proposed SculpTour fund-raising letter.

“You guys need to get out there with the plea that this is going to change the face of Suwanee, Gwinnett County and the Atlanta region,” said Denise Brinson, Suwanee’s economic and community development director, who provides staff support to the commission. “If 500 people or families in this area give $100 each, that’s $50,000 right there.”

Investment in future

Public art — usually placed along streets and sidewalks, in parks or building lobbies — is hardly a new idea. Many major cities mandate its inclusion in publicly financed facilities; much rarer are those that require (or urge) its inclusion in private development.

It’s not always wholeheartedly embraced. In Atlanta, famed examples both loved and loathed include Stephen Antonakos’ neon sculpture “Four Walls” above the down escalators at Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport, and Johnpaul Harris’s spread-armed sculpture of Atlanta icon Andrew Young in Walton Spring Park downtown.

But many involved in Suwanee’s efforts say they have witnessed the beneficial impact public art can have on a community’s image in their travels to cities in America and Europe. Some experts agree.

“What public art does is the same thing that a pleasing streetscape or good architecture does — it makes where you are a better, more interesting and richer place to live,” said David Hamilton, a principal at Praxis3 Architects in Atlanta and co-chairman of the Metropolitan Public Art Coalition. “From the outsider’s perspective, it’s the same thing. It makes it a better place to visit and to be. And if it’s transformative enough, it may be something people want to visit just for the public art.”

In fact, Hamilton suggests, Suwanee’s timing in embracing public art might turn out to have been just about right.

“The world is going to be different when we come out of this recession,” he predicted. “Our priorities will have changed. In the future, cheap land and big houses will mean less than being in a place where you can walk to sophisticated, stimulating things and not be so isolated. I think towns that invest in cultural structures — art, parks — are going to thrive.”

‘Amazing to watch’

While some other Georgia municipalities extend a hand to public art — Lilburn since 2005 has required it in all new private development over $750,000 — few appear to match Suwanee’s enthusiastic embrace of it on all levels.

Already, the public arts commission has spawned an offshoot: The Suwanee Arts Partnership, a group of volunteers that helps raise money and spread the gospel about initiatives like Arts in the Park and the SculpTour. There’s also the Suwanee-based North Gwinnett Arts Association, an organization of area artists now working on a program to display members’ work in several empty storefronts in the recently developed Town Center area.

One person who shows up for every Arts Partnership meeting, Lilburn resident Sonny Franks, says it’s hard not to get swept up in the group’s enthusiasm.

A commercial sign maker, Franks first became acquainted with Suwanee’s affection for public art in 2006, when an international “meetup” of sign artists he organized wanted to collaborate on a mural. Suwanee eagerly turned over the side of a building facing Buford Highway in Town Center Park. The result is a concert scene whose “audience” includes the faces of James Brown, Travis Tritt and 35 other members of the Georgia Music Hall of Fame.

“There’s people there who see the need for public art and the value of it,” said Franks. “And they don’t mind expending some energy and a little money to make it happen.”

Dissent, determination

Yet some Suwaneeans do mind their city’s focus on public art — particularly when it’s underwritten by taxpayers or it puts what they see as undue demands on businesses.

“How can you ask businesses to spend 1 percent on art when they’re having to lay people off?” wondered Maurice Cook, who had urged that construction of the new city hall be delayed. “The timing of this was very bad. They approved buying this $70,000-plus art when we were already in a problem. It wasn’t like they didn’t know people were losing their homes and their jobs.”

Goodman said that the money for the Rolstad sculpture came from the overall construction budget for city hall, and didn’t represent an additional expenditure. He called the colorful, 1,900-piece play on railroad ties (a nod to the trains that still run through town) “an integral part of the building ... as much a part of it as the railings and tiled floors.”

Mayor Williams noted that the 2008 ordinance doesn’t require developers to do anything other than meet with the public arts commission and discuss possibilities for spending 1 percent on art — or not.

Anything more obligatory than that could be bad for business. Or maybe it’s just not what Suwanee’s all about.

“We want to at least register on developers that this is a community priority,” said Williams.

“I would hope that developers are going to realize Suwanee is unique and that they’ll see investment in public art as an investment in the community.”