CultureNOW - Fire Dance: David Black and City of Fort Myers Public Art Collection

Fire Dance

http://davidblacksculpture.com

A native of Gloucester, MA, David Black received his BA cum laude (Phi Beta Kappa) from Wesleyan University-Connecticut, his MA from Indiana University and served until his retirement as professor emeritus in art at Ohio State University.

Black began his career in sculpting in ceramics. After 12 years, he morphed into bronze casting while on a fellowship grant in Mexico. He refined his skills in Florence, while on a Fulbright scholarship in Italy, and then Berlin, during a two-year fellowship during which Die Neue Nationalgalerie commissioned a 22 foot tall sculpture named "Skypiece" for its sculpture courtyard and held a major one-man exhibition of his gallery-size sculpture, “David Black in Berlin.”

His present-day love affair with aluminum was serendipitous. After winning an “Individual Artist Grant” from the National Endowment of the Arts, Black returned to the United States and became a professor emeritus in art at The Ohio State University. “I heard one day that an aircraft company in Columbus, Ohio [Northern Aircraft] had ceased making F-14s, leaving them with tons of surplus aluminum plates that they’d previously used to make the fighter jet’s wings,” Black explains. Each honeycomb aluminum slab was 28 feet long, 10 feet wide, an inch thick and weighed a whopping 3,000 pounds. “I didn’t know what I was going to do with them, but I bought 24 plates. I had to. They were virtually giving them away. Scrounge, scrounge, scrounge. That’s how you start out as a sculptor.” So Black hired two flatbeds to pick them up and deliver them to an open field behind Ohio State’s ceramic department. “I found I could cut them with a power-driven concrete saw, the kind they use to cut up city streets, and that’s when I started making this kind of public sculpture.”

There was one glitch. Black had no prospective buyers for the four immense sculptures he made from the scrap aluminum. Nevertheless, he retired from full-time teaching in 1984 and a year later his monumental "Windpoint" won the Shikanai, the grand prize in the prestigious Henry Moore International Sculpture Competition in Nagano, Japan.

Over the ensuing 28 years, Black as built a reputation as one of the leading monumental sculptors in the world. "Of all the American artists that I know who make works that are meant for public space," states art critic and Art Criticism editor Donald Kuspit, "David Black is unequivocally the most important. His work is both architecturally significant in the way it relates to the buildings surrounding it, and sculpturally significant in terms of the play of its forms in three-dimensional space, and the way it relates to and in space."

At 47 feet tall by 140 feet long, "Flyover" is Black’s largest public art installation. Located in Dayton, Ohio, it is a memorial to the Wright Brothers first powered flight. The stainless steel sculpture was chosen by the National Council of Structural Engineers Association for a national “Special Projects Award.” When asked to explain the discrepancy between the sculpture’s length of 140 feet and the 120 feet covered in the air by the Wright Brothers' plane, Black smiles coyly and answers, “You have to add in the length of the plane, which was 20 feet from tip to tail.”

David Black has mounted major exhibitions at museums and galleries throughout the United States and Europe, including the Contemporaries Gallery and PS One in New York, The Gilman Gallery in Chicago, the Taft Museum in Cincinnati, the Indianapolis Museum of Art, the Columbus Museum of Art, the University of Iowa Art Museum, the Dayton Art Institute, Die Neue Nationalgalerie and Amerika Haus in Berlin and the Lehmbruck Museum in Duisburg, Germany.

"Fire Dance" is Black's first commission in the state of Florida. Like the park in which it resides, the sculpture is open so that people can walk through it and look up. “I like the idea of letting people see it from underneath,” Black says. “I want them to enjoy the piece from every angle."

Tom Hall, Art Southwest Florida (www.artswfl.com)

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Artist
David Black

Collection
City of Fort Myers Public Art Collection

Dates

Installed, 2012

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Description

Tom Hall, Art Southwest Florida (www.artswfl.com)

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Fire Dance is the first commission awarded to an artist by the City of Fort Myers Public Art Committee. Located in a circle where Bay Street dead-ends at the eastern edge of Centennial Park, the 25-foot-tall Dupont red aluminum sculpture rivals the palm trees that circumscribe it and appears to be as tall as the southbound lane of the Edison Bridge. The sculptor is David Black, who was chosen by the Public Art Committee from a field of 162 artists who responded to the City’s RFQ, a national call to artists interested in submitting their qualifications and proposals. It is not the first time Black has won a competition for a public art commission. In fact, he’s won 35 national and three international sculpture competitions, one in Nagano, Japan, a second in Berlin and the third in Canada.

Black calls his public sculpture “proto-architecture” because it combines architectural elements such as pillars, arches, canopies and the use of light with the energy and references of sculpture. His community landmarks engage their environments spatially as well as culturally, connecting strongly with the viewer. “When designing a sculpture,” Black observes, “you have to consider the site. Here, I wanted my piece to be taller than the surrounding palm trees. You must consider the elements as well. Because of southwest Florida’s intense sunlight, I’ve had Dupont add UV protection, like sunscreen, to the paint to retard fading.”

Fire Dance represents Black’s interpretation of the park’s energy and vitality during events. “My wife, Karlita, and I first visited Centennial Park at night. We walked right into a jazz festival. Fire Dance incorporates the sounds of the music and the noise of the crowd. Circles within circles; it’s active, open, airy and rhythmic, just like jazz.

“It is my hope," says Black, "that Fire Dance will lift each viewer’s spirits and deepen their sense of community with Fort Myers by engendering a sense of civic pride.”

Tom Hall, Art Southwest Florida (www.artswfl.com)

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Location

Centennial Park
1411 Heitman Street
Fort Myers, FL 33901
United States

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