The whole sordid episode involving New York sculptor Joel Shapiro – whose career in 1987 was just starting a sharp upward trajectory – was embarrassing at the time and helped firmly entrench a national image of Charlotte as a city of rubes and rednecks.
Our city art commission had chosen his proposal for a 22-foot bronze work, a collection of rectangles resembling a human in motion, for the front of the to-be-built (and now demolished) Charlotte Coliseum on Tyvola Road. But one art commission member, Robert Cheek – who later went to prison for cocaine trafficking – didn’t like the choice. He helped whip up popular scorn. Either Cheek or deejays John Boy and Billy dubbed the figure “Gumby,” after the green clay animated figure.
Ultimately the City Council, which in those days had final say on public art purchases, nixed it 7-4. History note: Voting against the work were Richard Vinroot (later to be mayor), Ann Hammond, Al Rousso, Ron Leeper, Roy Matthews, Gloria Fenning and Minette Trosch. Trosch said she feared repercussions on the public art program if they accepted the art. Voting for it were Cyndee Patterson, Pam Patterson, Charlie Dannelly and Velva Woollen.
Of course, the “Angels in America” spat 10 years later didn’t help. Just as people elsewhere were starting to forget how many Charlotte folks were keen to make fun of art, we reminded them that many here were also so homophobic they’d kill funding to the arts because a theater group performed a work that depicted gay men.
Cut to 2011. I see the affection people have for Niki de Saint Phalle’s “Firebird” – dubbed Disco Chicken by some – at the Bechtler. You can hardly go by (and since it’s between my office and Amelie’s coffee shop, I go by it a lot) without seeing someone photographing someone else at the Firebird. The temporary exhibition of large Saint Phalle works in the park across from the museum draws a steady stream of viewers, including children scampering through that huge skull. (Be sure to go inside, where it’s mirrored and blue and serene.) The Bechtler, filled with modern art, is drawing great crowds.
I think Charlotte has matured. Finally.
The whole episode was painful for Shapiro. He later told the Observer’s Richard Maschal it was “a low point” in his career. Shapiro was at that 1987 council meeting. Our old files have a photo from the meeting, with Shapiro looking on as a speaker holds a clumsy wooden contraption saying it was something he made in fifth grade. The photo caption doesn’t say that the speaker was making fun of Shapiro’s work, but that would certainly be my guess.
Seeing which way the vote would go, Shapiro left before it was taken and returned to New York. Today his work is in major museums all over the country, including the National Gallery and the N.C. Museum of Art. You can see it at Davidson College. You can see it in Greenville, S.C. But not in Charlotte.
So why don’t we try to bring that Shapiro work back to where it should have been all along? Although it would have cost $400,000 in 1987, today his works can sell for seven-figure (corrected) sums. This would take patrons with significant money. Queens Table, where are you?
Would Shapiro consent to this? He might not. But maybe he’d see that this city has grown and changed. Sure, there are plenty of people (including some politicians) who think any sculpture other than soldiers on horseback is weird, or who look at a Picasso and say, “My fifth-grader could do that.” But that’s true in New York as well as Charlotte. The difference is that there are plenty of people here today with a much wider appreciation of art.
Plus, I think there’s a reason the name “Gumby” stuck, even among Shapiro supporters who were angry and embarrassed about the whole thing. Even the tiny wooden model had life and spark, and so much personality it demanded a name. So Gumby it became, and Gumby is how it is remembered in local lore.
Now it’s time to bring him home. After all, Disco Chicken needs a buddy.
Photo: 1987 Observer file photo of Joel Shapiro with a model of his proposed sculpture. Photo by Diedra Laird.