Artistic inspiration is a plentiful commodity. From Van Gogh to that guy down at the coffee shop who’s always nattering on about his great idea for a novel, it seems everyone has visions of masterpieces dancing in their heads.
Yet turning that inspired notion into something tangible requires uncommon amounts of dedication and pure hard work. Which explains what a half-dozen people were doing recently muscling a 200-pound steel spider into place in Suwanee’s Town Center Park in 90-degree heat.
“Do you want it facing this way, or that way?” asked Calvin Dailey, a Public Works Department employee.
“Let’s ask the artist,” suggested Denise Brinson, Suwanee’s economic and community development manager.
It’s not hard finding artists or their work in Suwanee these days. Yesterday’s second annual Arts in the Park festival may have come and gone in this Gwinnett County city of 16,000 residents, but its SculpTour event is here to stay for the next 10 months.
A hard-to-pull-off, harder-still-to-resist experiment in public art, the inaugural SculpTour features 15 works ranging in height from 2½ feet to 15 feet, and fashioned out of everything from traditional bronze and stone to fiberglass and galvanized steel.
Selected through a competitive process by Suwanee’s 3-year-old Public Arts Commission, the pieces are located in and around the park, anchored at one end by City Hall, with its dramatic, two-story glass front.
The idea behind the SculpTour is easy. Well, easier than building and stocking a museum:
Pay the artists a small stipend (none of it using public funds) to essentially “rent” their works for the duration. Commit to purchasing one of the sculptures at the end of a public voting process, starting in July. Repeat annually until Suwanee — once the site of the Atlanta Falcons’ practice facilities — becomes well known as a place where all manner of visually arresting and/or appealing sculptures go to take up permanent outdoor residence.
Oh, and one more thing: Throw open Suwanee’s metaphorical doors and invite the whole world in to hang out.
“You can look at Town Center and say, ‘Do we really need more people coming here?’ ” city councilman and Public Arts Commission chairman Dick Goodman said about the restaurant-ringed park, where children play in the public fountain on sunny days. “Well, yeah. We want them here. What’s more, we want them to want to be here, whether they live here or are just visiting for a day.”
And how better to do that than to let them mingle with the likes of “Free Spirit,” “Ribbon Dance,” “Deconstructed Bolt” or the dozen other pieces made by artists in Georgia, Florida, North Carolina and Missouri?
Damon Lusky, a Dawsonville sculptor who ingeniously forges large outdoor works out of metal, sounded almost hopeful about the prospect of the public getting up close and personal with his bit of public art.
“Once people find out there’s a giant spider in the park, I fully expect there to be lots of pictures of kids sitting on it,” Lusky said last week as his “Arachnid” was bolted into place.
If, to an observer, the multilegged creature looked ready to slink off its pedestal and amble through the park in search of someone’s picnic lunch, Lusky likely wouldn’t have any problem with that interpretation. “I think that half the people who see it will love it and half will probably be scared to death of it,” he laughed about his piece. “But that’s OK. That’s the whole point of art. Art is what it is to you.”
What the SculpTour “is,” meanwhile, is testament to many people’s dedication and hard work in service of an inspired idea.
No sooner had Suwanee made its first major public art statement in March 2010 — installing “Shimmering Echoes,” a $78,000 “suspended sculpture” by Seattle artist Koryn Rolstad inside City Hall — than attention turned to the SculpTour. In some ways, it would be more difficult to pull off than getting all 1,900 pieces of Rolstad’s sculpture arranged and hung just right. Having forsworn using any public money, the SculpTour would be totally reliant on private donors to be up and running by this summer.
“It was chicken-and-egg time for a while, like, ‘Do we do the [request for artists’ proposals] without knowing if we’ll have the money to put it on?’” recalled Brinson, who provides staff support to the public arts commission. “When we’d raised $25,000 by the end of the year [2010], we had enough to pull the trigger. We still couldn’t buy one at that point, but we could ‘rent’ at least 10.”
Now that total is up to about $45,000 — Peoples Bank & Trust, Georgia Natural Gas and Ssam’s Grill and Cafe each donated $10,000; Ippolito’s Italian Restaurant overlooking the park gave $3,000, and the Gwinnett County Convention and Visitors Bureau came through with a $4,000 grant. That allowed for a 15-piece SculpTour (pedestals were purchased for $600 apiece, but they can be reused in subsequent years ) and for the purchase of one of the works at its conclusion.
The public will decide which one it will be. They’ll have a wide range to choose from, whether it’s the eye-popping lime green figure of a person aiming a solar panel at City Hall (“Bright Ideas #2” by Lori Sturgess of Roswell) or the clever and potentially controversial faith-based take on a phone booth (“Prayer Booth” by Dylan Mortimer of Kansas City, Mo.)
And early evidence suggests the public will come. On the day that Lusky’s piece and six others were installed, Payton McClendon and Kayla Settle checked out “Free Spirit” by Jennifer Freeman of Johns Creek. Sipping from their Planet Smoothie cups, the duo thoughtfully studied the cement and mosaic figure of a woman from all angles.
“We were all the way over there and we said, ‘What’s that?’ ” Payton, 16, said, pointing to where they’d come from the other side of the park.
“Everyone will get something different from it,” Kayla said approvingly. “That’s so cool.”
