As cities become more bike friendly, bike parking racks become civic furniture design problems. Nashville has commissioned a series of bike racks that commemorate different aspects of the city's culture drawing inspiration from the music scene as Microphone, by Keith Harmon, Mac Hill and Franne Lee does or the challenge of security like Matt Young's Emerge.

Sculptures like Citizen Thomas H. Sayre's piece in Public Square, allow its audience to interact with it by letting them crank the arms towards points of interest downtown.

Another program, the Watermark Series, commemorates the 2010 flooding of the Cumberland River. Works have been created that are situated in the affected neighborhoods.
Buddy Jackson's Watermark: Emergence, is a sculpture of an African-American woman's face emerging from the ground symbolizing the resiliency of the Bordeaux community.

photo © Alice Aycock 2011

Ghost Ballet for the East Bank Machineworks (2007)
Nashville, TN
Artist:
Alice Aycock

FEATURED ARTIST: LAWRENCE ARGENT

Denver Artist Lawrence Argent is probably best known for his big blue bear I See What You Mean peering into the Colorado Convention Center. Like all convention centers, the building consists of a very large black box of exhibit space and a series of expandable meeting rooms, surrounded by a vast corridor which is glazed in what seems to be an endless facade. Bears are native to the Rocky Mountains. They are also curious. Hence, the solution of having an oversized 40' tall bear standing in front of the equally oversized building ties everything together. Humorous, engaging, it has become iconic of Denver.

Leap at the Sacramento Airport is metaphorically about flight and what flying means. A giant rabbit (native to the area) jumps into a suitcase several stories down in the atrium. Most airports are really long corridors stringing the gates together. There is a cacaphony of signage to entice travellers who have little time to all the stores. Art placed in these settings is frequently the loser. Leap by virtue of its scale, color and exuberance holds its own. A third sculpture in this series was installed last month in downtown Chendu, China. I am Here is a giant panda climbing up the side of a building on one of the main shopping streets in a gesture that calls attention to the plight of that species; it is reputed to be the largest panda sculpture in China.

Ghost Trolley in a median strip in Aurora is a different kind of memorial. Many American cities developed along their streetcar routes. A major urban railroad system was begun in the 1870's in Denver. It lasted until after the second world war when the rail system gave way to the automobile. The Colfax corridor was the primary route that extended the city westwards to the mountains, the artwork commemorates the terminus of that line.

FEATURED PHOTOGRAPHER: EZRA STOLLER

Travel was not as ubiquitous in the 50's and 60's as it is today. Ezra Stoller took the crisp black and white large format photographs of many of the major works of architecture that came to represent the buildings themselves for most people. We thought it would be informative to look what happened to some of those buildings.

Skidmore Owings and Merrill's Manufacturer's Hanover Building on 5th Avenue, was the first glass bank. At the time a proper bank was a traditional stone edifice that looked solid. So, Henry Dreyfuss was commissioned to design a street level vault that would be secure. And, because it was a tenet of modernism that art should be incorporated into architecture, Harry Bertoia created a mobile that hung over the escalator and a screen that was a backdrop to the banking floor. Something like 30,000 people lined up to see it when it opened. The building was landmarked, but last year a new generation of architects at Skidmore Owings and Merrill was commissioned to renovate their own building. Rechristened 510 Fifth Avenue it is now a clothing store. The door is all that remains of the vault and the Bertoia sculptures are in storage.

FEATURED PHOTOGRAPHER: ANTON GRASSL

We teamed up with Boston Photographer Anton Grassl whose career has followed a typical trajectory. After art school he began taking photographs to make ends meet. He enjoyed it and proved to be good at it and eventually it became his day job. Photography has changed since he began. Darkrooms are no longer needed. And everyone has a digital camera on one end of their smartphone and fancies themself an expert. Photo shoots which used to be laborious projects involving endless jelling of light fixtures and waiting for the season to improve has become in this day of photoshop something adjustable on a computer screen. What sets a good photographer apart is an eye for composition and the care taken in crafting the images so that there is more to work with.
We asked ourselves whether the photographer's perspective of a building defined what it is. Could we revisit an icon of modern architecture 60 years later; would we look at it in the same way?